Is that what you meant to say?
Given you link, perhaps you meant "only a second hand source", or "just a second hand source" or "barely a second hand source"?
Please don't forget your comment in post #38:
To which I responded by posting links which clearly do show just what the "scientific consensus" is today.
Now you reply with a link showing that "scientific fraud" has grown from one one-thousandths of one percent in the 1970s to one one-hundredths of one percent today.
And this is out of many millions of scientific papers published each year.
I'd say, that's a cause to rejoice (!) since it implies that somebody is actually reading and checking up on all those many millions of scientific papers -- and finding mistakes, whatever the cause.
I'd say, in no possible way is human nature, given our fallen and sinful state, ever accurate to within one one-hundredths of one percent.
So the fact that only one scientific report out of every 10,000 contains errors significant enough to force withdrawal tells us either that A) scientists as a group are amazingly self-disciplined, or B) they really aren't yet being checked carefully enough.
Naturally, I suspect the latter, but am very glad to see the ten-times increase in the scrutiny these guys & gals are getting today.
A primary source is an original study with data and methods of scientific research. There are a set of rules for the scientific method which are not always fallowed. A secondary source is a what someone else writes about the primary source. Scientific consensus is where most scientists agree on a theory and most of the data. Scientific theories are seldom proved as the last rule of the scientific method is to redo the whole process. Wikipedia is a place where people post stuff and others others can take it down. A real scientist will write up his stuff in a scientific Journal which will still be a secondary source. Global warming is a good study of scientific fraud.