How We Work
Editorial Standards
WellnessInsider’s sourcing requirements, review process, and AI-assistance disclosure policy — the operational rules that govern every article we publish.
Sourcing Policy
The sourcing rules that apply to every health and wellness claim, regardless of topic, author, or format.
Primary over secondary
Articles must cite primary sources — peer-reviewed studies, clinical guidelines, regulatory statements — for every health claim. Secondary sources (other wellness media, news reports) may provide context but do not qualify as evidence.
Named, linkable sources only
Every source is linked to its canonical location: the PubMed abstract, the guideline PDF, the FDA communication page. We do not accept "according to research" without a specific citation. Paywalled sources are named and cited even when the full text is not publicly accessible.
Recency and relevance
For rapidly evolving topics we prioritise sources published within the last five years. Older foundational research is cited where it remains the primary evidence base, with clear attribution of its age and any subsequent updates to the scientific consensus.
Conflicts of interest
Industry-funded studies are cited with the funding source disclosed in the article. Where an industry-funded study is the only available evidence, we say so. We do not exclude industry-funded research categorically — we contextualise it honestly.
Review Process
The editorial and clinical review stages every article passes through before publication.
Author qualification
Every article carries a byline. Work produced by the in-house desk is published under the WellnessInsider Editorial Team byline, and the editorial team is listed publicly with the role each person holds. Every draft is reviewed by an editor with subject-matter knowledge before it enters the publishing queue.
Medical review
When an article carries a clinical sign-off, the reviewer's name, credentials, and review date are displayed on the article, and the reviewer is never the author. Articles that have not been through clinical review do not display a review line, so the absence of one is meaningful rather than ambiguous.
Evidence grading
Before an article can be approved, every health claim passes through our automated evidence validator. Claims receive an A–D grade based on the supporting sources attached to them. Any article with a D-grade claim (unattributed) is returned for revision and may not publish until the claim is sourced or removed.
Post-publication updates
Every article carries a visible last-updated date. When the underlying evidence changes — a meta-analysis updates, a guideline is revised, a product is recalled — the article is updated in place and the update is dated. Substantive factual corrections are logged on the public corrections page.
Fact-Checking
How claims are verified before publication, and what happens to a figure we cannot trace to a source.
Every number traces to a source
Each statistic, effect size, and health claim is checked against the primary source it is attributed to before publication. Sources are listed at the foot of every article with a direct link, so a reader can follow any figure back to the study it came from rather than taking our word for it.
Unverifiable claims are cut, not softened
When a figure cannot be traced to a retrievable primary source, it is removed from the article. It is not rewritten into vaguer language to make it defensible. A hedged version of an unsourced statistic is still an unsourced statistic.
No fabricated experts
Every named author and medical reviewer on this site is a real person whose role and credentials are verifiable, and each has a profile page. A byline or a review line that implies expertise nobody actually supplied is a categorical editorial failure, and it is the failure mode we design hardest against.
Association is not causation, and we say which one we mean
Most wellness research is observational. Where a finding comes from a cohort study rather than a randomised trial, the article says so in the sentence where the number appears, not in a caveat at the bottom. Stating the limits of the evidence is part of reporting it accurately.
Evidence Grading
The A–D rubric used to grade the evidence behind every health claim — the technical counterpart to these editorial standards.
Read Our Methodology