Methodology

The numbers, with definitions

Headline counts on the homepage, about page and this file used to be typed by hand, so “human studies” and “citations” could both be true and still disagree. They are one module now. Each label below is the definition that module uses.

Inclusion

We report what evidence exists at every level, label the level, and do not treat regulatory approval as the definition of truth. A page here should say what has been measured in people first, with numbers, then say precisely what has not been established, and where the record is thin it should say why it is thin.

1. 01

   Not approved is a regulatory fact, not a scientific finding.

   A compound can lack approval because a trial failed, or because no one ever ran one. Those are different situations and we distinguish them on every page.

2. 02

   Absence of a randomized trial is not absence of human data.

   Phase 1 safety studies, observational cohorts, genetic association studies, case series and trials of a parent molecule are all human evidence. We report them, labeled for what they are, instead of writing "none".

3. 03

   Where nothing human exists, we say so precisely.

   "No human study of any design" means exactly that, and we name what was searched to reach it.

4. 04

   Why a trial is missing is part of the answer.

   A molecule nobody can patent attracts no sponsor for a 300-person trial, so silence around it is a fact about how drug development is funded rather than a finding about the molecule. It cuts both ways: with no trial, a real harm and a real absence of benefit would both go undetected.

5. 05

   Negative results stay on the page.

   If a trial failed, we say it failed and give the numbers. We remove inaccurate dismissals, not inconvenient findings.

6. 06

   Open disputes are labeled as disputes.

   Where research groups disagree about a result, we say the question is contested rather than picking a side and presenting it as settled.

Citation verification

1,550 verified identifiers across 444 compound profiles. Those figures are counted from the database rather than typed into this sentence.

1. 01

   The human evidence is written first, with numbers.

   A profile leads with what was measured in people: the design, how many participants, the comparator, the effect size and its units. Animal and human findings never share a paragraph, and where the evidence is mice the sentence says mice.

2. 02

   Every identifier is resolved live before it is written.

   Each PubMed ID goes to the NCBI E-utilities record, each registration number to the ClinicalTrials.gov API, and Federal Register documents to the live HTML. The returned title is compared with the title on our page, the year is compared with the publication date, and the record is scanned for retraction markers. Nothing is written from memory.

3. 03

   A separate pass re-checks the citations after the fact.

   An independent script walks every citation in the database, resolves it again at the source, and exits with an error on any mismatch. Fabricated citations have been caught on this project six times, including ones we produced ourselves. The re-check exists because of that, and it is the reason this page can make the claim it makes.

4. 04

   A validator runs over the whole database before anything ships.

   It fails on a duplicate compound, a link to a profile that does not exist, a missing legal status, a citation year outside 1950 to 2026, a citation URL that is a search query rather than a record, and a review date that does not parse. It also fails on an em dash, which is a house style rule enforced in code so it cannot drift back in, and on any sentence that claims the site takes no commission while price rows exist.

5. 05

   Every page carries the date it was last reviewed.

   The record moves. A profile that has not been looked at since last spring says so, and when a new finding changes what a page should say, the old wording is corrected in public with a date rather than quietly replaced.

The floor for famous names

Nulls are findings

How this is funded

Knowledge stays free. Every page, every guide and every tool is free to read and stays free.

Price comparison rows may include disclosed affiliate links. Where a click earns something, the row prints the rate. Where no agreement is in place, the row says we earn nothing on this link today.

We never charge for knowledge. This site is supported by affiliate income, disclosed on the row it comes from, and no vendor has a say in what a page says. The harder test is whether a page tells you what went against it. No sponsored compounds, no paid placements, no advertising, no discount code of our own, no supplement line. Sellers on price pages are ranked by the certificate they publish before their price, and a page is free to tell you not to buy at all.

The live price board is /prices.

Refresh and review dates

Open data

The same counts, plus one row per compound, ship as a public dump and API at /data. Licensed CC BY 4.0. No personal data and no affiliate URLs. Cite the compound page for any clinical figure.

What we refuse to count

1. 01

   Sequence databases.

   UniProt, NCBI protein records and similar catalogues count sequences, not human evidence. A sequence is not a study, and we do not add it to a citation total.

2. 02

   Vendor SEO farms.

   Dosing blogs attached to storefronts, affiliate roundups, and purity pages that cite each other. They are not primary literature. When a vendor page is mentioned on a profile, it is labelled as a source of a dosing convention or a side-effect category, not as evidence that anything works.

3. 03

   Invented match scores.

   No compound is scored as best for an outcome. Participant counts, trial counts and null counts are arithmetic over this catalogue. They understate the wider literature and they say so.

4. 04

   First-hand reports added into a grade.

   What people using a compound report is counted separately from human studies and never added into the study total. A thousand people saying a thing worked is not a trial.