If you publish blogs on health and wellness topics, you need to include citations from authoritative sources that support the claims you make. This includes blogs about mental, physical and emotional health ranging from fitness tips and recipes to perspectives on therapy and psychiatric medication, to mindfulness and lifestyle “hacks.”
These all fall under the purview of E.E.A.T., Google’s set of guidelines provided for quality raters. There are higher expectations and standards for any subject with the potential to significantly impact someone’s health or safety.
Not only should you add authoritative citations to your blog, you should also:
- Use the sources in a meaningful way to support helpful, unique content that someone would actually benefit from reading. You want to add value, not just add to the existing consensus.
- Refer to your sources in a way that doesn’t detract from UX.
- Format citations properly.
What makes an authoritative citation?
For topics in the health and wellness sphere, use primary sources such as:
- Published scientific research studies
- Meta-analysis of a group of scientific studies
Ideally use a research study that’s highly relevant to your topic and relatively recent. If extensive research has been done in past years, a meta-analysis of those studies can be a great source of insights.
Don’t use secondary sources like:
- A blog or article that cites/summarizes primary sources
- An incomplete scientific study online that only shares the abstract and/or “snippets” of the full text
Let’s say you’re writing a blog about why beets are good for heart health:
How to find authoritative online sources to cite
On the SERP, search your topic and:
- Scan for results from National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other publishers of scientific literature
- Look for the SERP feature that highlights “Scholarly sources”
- Add the word “research” or “study” to your main query
Other methods:
- Search on scholar.google.com
- Go to the resources section of popular articles and see which sources they cite
- Use the “References and recommended reading” section at the end of research studies
How to format citations
You want your citations to be easily accessible yet unobtrusive. Here’s a great way to do this:
- Add a numbered notation in superscript in the blog text whenever a statement is supported by an authoritative source.
- At the bottom of the page, provide your sources in a numbered list under a heading called “References” or “Sources” or “Literature Cited”.
- Use APA format.
- Reference the DOI URL instead of the publisher URL.
Using our “beets for heart health” topic and primary source example, here’s how a properly formatted citation would look:
The good news is you don’t have to type out the APA citation. Many publishers include a “cite” button where you can choose your format and copy the citation:
Otherwise you can use a citation generator like Scribbr or QuillBot to save time.
If you feel like the list of citations at the end will be too long, you can hide them behind an accordion.
Remember most of your readers will be using a smartphone. Visit other health and wellness blogs on your phone and notice which citation practices are the most useful or annoying—then make sure yours belong to the first group.
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