A Living Document · Revised quarterly
Editorial Standards
How VitalScope decides what gets published, who reviews it, and where every claim is traced — written so any reader can inspect the process line by line.
Read the ProcessThe Workflow
From pitch to publication, in five checkpoints
Every article that appears under the VitalScope imprint clears the same five-stage gauntlet. "Physician-reviewed" is not a marketing line — it is a checklist executed by named members of a 42-person editorial board before a piece is allowed to load in your browser.
-
01
Intake & scope
A commissioning editor and a subject-matched clinician agree on the question being answered, the audience it's written for, and the primary sources it must cite. Pitches that cannot be answered with verifiable evidence are rejected at this stage.
-
02
Drafting
A staff writer or vetted contributor drafts the piece against a reading-time target of 4.2 minutes. Medical terminology is introduced once and reused plainly afterward — no jargon-as-authority.
-
03
Clinician review
A board-certified MD or PhD from the editorial board reads the draft against the current literature, flags any overstatement, and signs off on the clinical claims in writing before fact-checking begins.
-
04
Fact-check
One of four full-time fact-checkers verifies every statistic against PubMed, Cochrane Reviews, or the FDA/EMA databases, with an average turnaround of 38 minutes per article — the fastest in the health-publisher category, per Press Gazette's 2023 benchmark.
-
05
Publication & corrections
Once cleared, the article publishes with inline citations on every clinical claim. Any later correction is logged publicly in our Corrections Log — 1,180+ logged entries since launch, 96% caught before readers notice.
By the Numbers
Rigor, quantified
The figures a reader should be able to quote back to a skeptical friend — and then verify by visiting the linked log.
The Editorial Board
Six of the forty-two clinicians behind the seal
The full board includes 42 practicing physicians and research scientists across 19 specialties. Below are six representative members whose names you may see attached to the review notes that ship with each article.
Credential and institutional affiliation verified at the time of publication. The remaining 36 board members are listed in the contact directory.
Sourcing Standards
If a number appears in a VitalScope article, you can trace it back to one of four registries
Every clinical claim — every dosage, prevalence, hazard ratio, or guideline citation — is cross-checked against one of four primary source registries before publication, and the citation is rendered inline so you can open it in a new tab and check our work.
PubMed
For peer-reviewed primary literature, mechanistic explanations, and clinical-trial results. We favor systematic reviews and meta-analyses where they exist; case reports and preprints are flagged as such.
Cochrane Reviews
For evidence-of-evidence syntheses — particularly when a claim about a treatment's effectiveness has been contested in the literature. A Cochrane plain-language summary is preferred over the primary trials when one is available.
FDA & EMA databases
For drug approvals, label changes, safety communications, and recall notices. Anything we write about a regulated product references the agency's own document by name and date, not a press release.
Inline citations, every time
Our house style requires an inline citation on the first appearance of any clinical statistic. Footnote-only sourcing — the practice of citing sources in a footer that most readers never scroll to — is not permitted in our editorial workflow.
Sourcing policy was last revised in February 2025 and is reviewed each quarter by the editorial board's evidence committee.
Corrections & Trust
"A correction log is not a confession of failure. It is the public record that someone is reading the work, checking it, and willing to write down what they found — including the parts they got wrong."
Since launch, 1,180+ corrections have been recorded, dated, and tied to the specific articles they amend. Ninety-six percent of those corrections were caught by our own fact-checkers and editors before any reader reported them — a ratio we monitor as a leading indicator of process health, not as a marketing claim.
The log is searchable, filterable by topic, and never quietly edited. If a sentence in a 2022 article has been corrected, the live page carries both the original and the correction in plain view.
Inspect the Corrections Log