Every claim in a PeptideWikis entry about an effect, a risk, a mechanism, a regulatory status or a number links to the source it comes from. This page explains which sources we use, which we don’t, and how each citation is checked.
Sources we cite
- Research: peer-reviewed studies, found through PubMed and PubMed Central or by their DOI, and the journals that publish them.
- Clinical trials: trial records on ClinicalTrials.gov, for a trial’s design, size, status and whether results have been posted.
- Regulators: the U.S. FDA, the European Medicines Agency, the UK MHRA and Australia’s TGA.
- Anti-doping: the WADA Prohibited List and USADA.
- Law: the official text of US laws and regulations (eCFR, govinfo.gov, uscode.house.gov) and the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecutions.
- Companies: a drug maker’s own press release or its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, only for what the company itself announces: trial results not yet published in a journal, filing plans or dates.
Where a peer-reviewed paper and a company announcement both exist, we cite the paper.
Sources we don’t cite
We do not cite peptide sellers, clinics, forums, social media, blogs, Wikipedia or health news sites. We may read a news report to learn that something happened, but we cite the study, trial record or regulator it points to, never the report itself.
Entries also include a short section called “What users report”: a summary of what people commonly post online about a peptide. It is labelled as unverified self-reports, it contains no links and no doses, and it is never used as evidence anywhere else in the entry.
How every citation is checked
Before an entry is published, every source it cites is fetched and its own text is saved next to the sentence that cites it: the abstract for a PubMed study, the trial record for a ClinicalTrials.gov link, the page text for anything else. Each sentence is then checked against that text. A citation that contradicts its sentence stops the entry from being published until the sentence is fixed.
Retracted papers are not cited as evidence. We check each study against PubMed’s retraction notices and, for papers linked by DOI, against the OpenAlex database.
Each claim about an effect also carries its evidence level (laboratory, animal, human or approved use), so that a finding in mice is never presented as a result in people. The levels are explained in the editorial policy.
Keeping sources current
When a source link stops working, we point it to the official text again or replace the source, and note the change in the entry’s change log. Regulatory facts (FDA status, compounding status, WADA status) are re-checked against the regulator’s own pages every week, and each entry’s status box shows the date it was last checked.
If you find a citation that does not say what the entry says it does, please report it.