Editorial Policy

Every substance, interaction, and timing rule record moves through the same three stages before it is public.

1. Draft

A user question is identified, authoritative sources are located and recorded with their publisher, source type, URL, and access date, and a factual summary is drafted directly from those sources. Uncertainty is noted explicitly rather than filled in. Nothing in this stage is public.

2. Verification

Before a record can move forward, it is checked that:

• every major claim traces to a recorded source;
• citations resolve and are not misrepresented;
• the interaction direction and drug-class scope are correct;
• a stated spacing interval is explicitly supported by a source;
• severity language is proportionate to the evidence, not inflated;
• "no documented interaction found" wording has not been converted into a safety claim;
• the page answers the user's question on its own; and
• the title and description are unique to this page.

A verified record is still not necessarily public yet.

3. Publication

Only after passing verification does a record move to published, recording who reviewed it, when, and which sources were used. This is also enforced technically: the database will reject an attempt to mark a substance, interaction, or timing rule as published if it has no linked evidence source at all.

Corrections

Reports submitted via corrections are reviewed the same way -- they can trigger a record moving back to draft for correction, but a submission itself is never automatically published or treated as authoritative on its own.

See also the methodology page for the source hierarchy and evidence quality labels used throughout this process.