Cite, or don't claim.
Most public peptide writing is marketing dressed as science. The rule here is the opposite: evidence over opinion, citation over claim, published over promised — and where the evidence isn't in yet, we say so rather than inventing a number.
1 · The Evidence Maturity Profile
Instead of a single letter grade, every compound is profiled across seven independent axes. A single grade averages strong and weak evidence into one number that hides the detail. Seven axes show where a compound is actually backed — and where it isn't.
2 · From axes to an S–F tier
The public tier comes from a weighted 0–100 score across eight dimensions: the six evidence axes above plus Evidence Consistency (do studies agree?) and Claim Risk (how far do popular claims outrun the data?). Human evidence carries the most weight.
Approved or trial-grade human evidence
Strong, consistent human data
Real human evidence, gaps remain
Mostly preclinical / early human
Thin — animal or anecdote-led
Little credible evidence
3 · Three honesty states
Every number on the site carries one of three states, so you always know how solid it is:
Derived deterministically from the real corpus (e.g. Literature Volume from indexed source counts).
A first-pass score grounded in documented public facts — FDA approval, registered-trial activity, and the established state of the evidence — attributed to a reviewer and revisable. Not invented figures.
Specific claim verdicts and other judgments not yet authored are shown as pending — never guessed, never a placeholder zero.
4 · Why we don't auto-grade evidence quality
The citation corpus is built by searching PubMed for each compound by name. That retrieval is broad on purpose — but a returned paper may only mention a compound, or match its name by coincidence. So a raw count of trials in the corpus is not proof a compound was tested in humans.
- How much literature mentions the compound
- Rough research activity and momentum
- A starting list for an editor to review
- That those papers actually study the compound
- That any of it was done in humans
- That the results were positive — or replicated
5 · The source hierarchy
Not all citations are equal. Every source is graded A–F on its own merits and slotted on this ladder — strongest at the top:
- Meta-analyses & systematic reviews. The strongest synthesis of human evidence.
- Randomized controlled trials. Phase 3 down to phase 1 — the closest thing to causal human evidence.
- Observational human studies. Cohorts and case-control work. Real people, weaker causal claims.
- Animal & mechanistic studies. Useful for plausibility, never treated as human evidence.
- In-vitro & case reports. Hypothesis-generating only.
- Regulatory documents. FDA labels, EMA and WADA records — authoritative for status, not efficacy.
- Press releases. Market context only, always labeled. Never evidence.
6 · How citations stay clean (three layers)
“Citation-backed” is only as good as what stops a bad citation from landing. A source has to beat three independent checks:
- 1At saveWhen an editor adds a source, its identifier is re-resolved live against NCBI, Crossref, or ClinicalTrials.gov. The editor must write an original summary and assign a quality grade before it can be marked verified.
- 2At publishA database gate refuses to publish a profile or claim that's missing required fields or its minimum of verified sources — and refuses to flip a source to verified without a resolvable identifier.
- 3At commitA pre-commit audit re-resolves every citation in the changed data files and blocks the commit if a stored title doesn't match the real paper.
Candidate citations ingested from PubMed are shown as found and labelled unverified until they clear this review. The verified-citation count shown across the site is computed from records, never set by hand.
7 · Uncertainty, conflicts & scope
- Uncertainty is shown, not smoothed. Where human and animal evidence diverge, the page says so. Animal findings are never written up as human findings; mixed claims keep their verdict and a confidence rating.
- No pay-to-play. Vendor rankings are editorial; any affiliate relationship is disclosed on that vendor's page. User reports are anecdotes, labeled as such — never evidence.
- Scope. Coverage spans weight loss, healing, growth hormone, skin, cognition, longevity, libido, and immune categories. Many compounds are not approved for human use.