How we work

Where our evidence comes from

Most of what is written about peptides online is written by someone selling them. We are not, and this page is how you check that.

The five places we read

1. 1.ClinicalTrials.gov, run by the US National Institutes of Health. The public register of trials that were started. We use it for the trials that were registered and then never reported a result, because with these compounds the missing result is usually the most important fact.
2. 2.PubMed, run by the US National Library of Medicine. The index of the peer-reviewed literature. If a claim about a peptide does not appear here in some form, it is marketing, not evidence, and we say so.
3. 3.The US Food and Drug Administration. Approval documents, advisory committee briefing papers, warning letters, and the lists of substances FDA has flagged as a compounding risk. FDA is the only body that has taken a formal, named position on most of these compounds.
4. 4.The European Medicines Agency. The second regulator. Where FDA has said nothing, or where the two disagree, we tell you that, because a disagreement between two regulators is worth more than either one alone.
5. 5.The Cochrane Library. An independent non-profit with a published conflict of interest policy. Cochrane rarely covers peptides directly, so we use it for something else: how to weigh evidence. Their method is the one we borrow.

What we never use

No peptide seller. No supplement retailer. No clinic marketing page. No podcast, no protocol blog, no site that ranks for a compound name because it is trying to sell you one. If you find one cited anywhere on this site, tell us and we will remove it.

How we grade

Every brief carries one of five grades for human evidence: none, minimal, limited, moderate, strong. The grade describes what has been tested in people. It is not a safety rating and it is not a recommendation. A compound can have strong evidence for one narrow use and none at all for the thing it is sold for, and we grade the thing it is sold for.

Why there are no doses on this site

We never publish an amount. Not in a brief, not in the tracker, not anywhere. We describe how many dose levels a trial tested and where a result fell among them, and nothing more. If you use the tracker you enter your own numbers and we will never suggest one.

When we are wrong

We will be. Email us at corrections@clearsource.info and we will correct it in the brief, date the correction, and say what changed. We do not quietly edit.

The same address is where to tell us a brief has gone out of date. We re-run a brief’s searches when something moves that could change it: a regulator publishes a position, a registered trial reports or changes status, or a paper we cite is retracted or formally challenged. We do not claim a fixed schedule, because an interval nobody keeps is worse than no promise at all. What the date on a brief tells you is the last time those searches were actually re-run.

Who pays us

Members, and nobody else. Nobody who sells peptides pays us anything, not for a link, an ad, a review or a placement, and nothing we earn changes what a brief says: no compound, seller or product can buy a grade or a placement. That is the whole reason a brief here is allowed to be unflattering.