It is clear that people should cite references for the claims they make, and I wholly agree with this. It is unclear, however, of what value there is in citing references in which no one or only a few people have access to (esp. it being unlawful to redistribute most articles without express consent). For example, I have access to Harvard's academic database, which is quite extensive, but it doesn't seem useful to cite an article that many people will not have access to and thus not be able to read or verify. Conversely, citing public sources like Wikipedia is not always reliable or acceptable.
I say this because it would seem to me that the kind of people who ask questions which require citations typically aren't the ones who have access to or knowledge of how to use university databases — otherwise, why would they not simply look it up themselves?
Given these premises, it seems almost counterproductive to cite articles which someone probably won't be able to access. Should we only cite publicly available research articles?
What is the policy on this?