Evidence standards
GRADES · SOURCES · CORRECTIONSA number without a source is a rumor. This page is the contract: what each grade means, which sources we accept, and how errors get fixed.
| GRADE | WHAT IT MEANS | TYPICAL SOURCE |
|---|---|---|
| A | Verified against primary record: registry entry, peer-reviewed paper, or official approval document. Numbers quoted directly. | ClinicalTrials.gov API (queried at build time), NEJM/Lancet/Science papers, FDA release records |
| B | Secondary but reviewed: authoritative summaries, archived organizational pages, established reference works. | NIH/HVTN/MHRP materials, Wayback Machine captures of PAVE's own site, textbook mechanisms |
| C | Interpretation. Labeled in-line wherever used; a reader can skip every C-claim and still have the whole factual record. | Field-funding analysis, editorial framing |
✓Verification at build time
Trial statuses, enrollment figures and dates on this site were queried live from the ClinicalTrials.gov API during the September 2026 build — not copied from news articles. The query log is kept in the project's research notes. Where journalism and registry disagree, the registry wins; where a paper and its press release disagree, the paper wins.
✗What we don't do
No numbers from memory. No "studies suggest" without a study. No aggregate statistics without their year. No AI-sounding filler: if a sentence could survive deletion without losing a fact, it gets deleted.
↺Corrections policy
Errors are fixed in place and logged in the post that announced them — not silently. Substantive corrections get their own entry in Updates. Write to contact@hivpave.org; include a source and we'll verify within a week.