Editorial Policy and Evidence Tiers

Three rules govern every page: name the evidence tier, keep the source visible, and never let a description drift into a recommendation. The rules are short because they are applied constantly, and each one exists to prevent a specific failure mode.

Evidence tiers

Tier one is a quantitative measurement in a defined system: an inhibition constant, a chromatographic purity figure, a mass spectrum. Tier two is a phenotype in a cell model, which is reproducible within a laboratory and frequently not reproducible across laboratories. Tier three is a whole-animal endpoint in a small cohort. Tier four is an unblinded report from an individual.

Every substantive sentence in the cluster can be traced to one of those tiers. Where a page mixes tiers, the paragraph names the shift explicitly. A sentence that begins with a tier-two observation and ends with a tier-four conclusion is the exact failure this policy exists to catch.

Citation practice

Identifiers are given rather than abstracts. An abstract drops the model, the concentration and the duration, and those three details decide whether a finding transfers. Where a source is paywalled, the note states the citation without quoting a conclusion second-hand.

Language discipline

Outcome words are reserved for measurements that support them. A change in a marker in a dish is described as a change in a marker in a dish. Words that imply a clinical result are not used at all on this site, because the underlying literature contains no clinical results for the compound discussed.

Commercial vocabulary is confined to the FAQ blocks, where readers arriving with a commerce-shaped question can be answered accurately and then redirected to the research material. Descriptions of buying, pricing or shipping are not the subject of any note, and no note is titled around them.

Boundary with advice

Describing what a study measured is publishing. Telling a person what to do with that information is practising, and this notebook does neither medicine nor dosing guidance. Where a reader's question is genuinely clinical, the answer given is that the question is clinical and outside the scope of the notes. That answer is not evasive; it is the accurate one.

Corrections and dates

Every note carries a revision date. Corrections are made in place and described rather than silently applied, and a note that has not been revisited in more than a year is treated as historical until it is checked again.