How research gets published here

This site is the public face of a private research corpus. The corpus already refuses to let bad citations in. This post is about the second gate — the one that makes sure nothing gets weaker on the way out the door.

The rule that generates all the others: a reader must be able to check everything here, and an error must not be able to survive a commit.

How this is written

The questions, the claims, and every verdict are the author’s. What gets built, what would count as killing a claim, and what rung a claim sits on are human decisions. The protocol governing this work forbids an AI from promoting a claim or calling one falsified — that requires a measurement and a person.

Drafting and analysis are AI-assisted. Prose, analysis code and measurement pipelines are produced with an AI assistant working inside those protocols, then read and edited by the author. Research assistance runs on a local, zero-retention model on hardware the author controls.

Citations are neither hand-written nor model-generated. Every reference is resolved against Crossref or PubMed by a separate tool and copied in mechanically. A validator rejects any citation typed by hand, any bare DOI, and any key not already in the ledger — so a reference here cannot be invented, by a person or by a model. Where a source is cited without its full text having been read, the article says so rather than describing what it found.

Confidence tiers are copied, not argued. An article may not claim more confidence than the weakest claim it rests on, and that is checked before it can publish.

That disclosure used to live in a collapsed drawer in the footer of every page. It belongs in an article instead, where it can be read rather than dismissed.

The gate

Publishing is blocked by a script rather than by good intentions. It enforces, among other things:

• Cite by key only. A citation in the body is key="levin2018" and nothing else. A bare DOI in prose fails the build. So does an inline Author et al. 2021 — because if a name cannot be typed by hand, it cannot be invented. That rule exists because an audit once found a paper cited for months under an author who does not exist.
• Both directions must agree. Every key declared in a post’s front matter is cited in the body, and every key cited in the body is declared. A source that is listed but never used is dead weight; one used but not listed has no verified provenance.
• Every key resolves in the ledger, which is machine-copied from the research repo. If a key is not there, it does not exist for publication purposes.
• No tier laundering. A post may not assert a confidence tier stronger than the weakest claim it rests on.
• Nothing from a retracted or archived directory, and no self-asserted [VERIFIED] badges — that is a check that passes upstream, not a label anyone applies.

The gate runs again in CI against the committed data, without access to the private research repo. That is deliberate: what this site claims must be checkable from the public repository alone.

What the gate cannot do

It proves the citation plumbing is sound. It cannot prove the prose is honest. A correctly-cited paper can still be misrepresented, and only reading catches that.

So there is a manual pass every time, looking for the specific ways a claim outruns its source: correlation written as causation, animal results written as human results, in-vitro written as in-vivo, a single study written as consensus, an effect reported without an effect size. And the standing rule that an abstract is not a paper — if the full text has not been read, the post may say the work exists but not what it found.

The tools

Everything here is built from open, inspectable pieces, which is the point:

Site	Jekyll on GitHub Pages, no custom plugins — so the build is reproducible by anyone with the repository
Gates	Python, standard library only. No dependencies to install means no excuse not to run them
Registries	Crossref and PubMed, queried directly. Every author, year, title, journal and identifier on this site came out of one of those responses
Signal analysis	Welch’s method for spectral estimation, FOOOF for separating periodic from aperiodic components, MNE for reference implementations to check against
Public data	OpenNeuro and PhysioNet, for validating apparatus against recordings made by people with better instruments
Design	A shared design system with self-hosted OFL typefaces and MIT-licensed icons. Nothing on this site is fetched from a CDN

The confidence badges are worth one note. The five tiers are distinguishable by colour, but colour never carries the meaning alone — each badge also ships a glyph and a word, because the palette fails a colour-blindness check past three categories and a reader who cannot see the difference should not be the one who loses information.

How posts stay in sync with the research

A post is not a snapshot that drifts. The chain runs one way:

1. A claim lives in the research repo with its sources, its computed tier, and the conditions that would prove it false.
2. A sync script copies only what published posts actually reference into this repository — the bibliography and the claim tiers, nothing else. It refuses to copy a key that never resolved against a registry, or a claim with no tier, or anything from a retracted directory.
3. The gate then validates the posts against that copied data, and a separate check fails if the copy is stale relative to the research repo.

So a tier displayed on this site is the tier the corpus computed, at the commit the data was copied. If a claim weakens upstream, the post cannot keep the stronger badge past the next sync.

Corrections are amended, never erased. A factual error gets a dated correction appended to the post that made it, and if a claim is retracted upstream it is retracted here in the same change that updates the data. Nothing is quietly edited away.

What this site is not

It is not a results feed. Most of what gets established here is a fact about an instrument — that a given piece of hardware cannot reach a given question — and that is a different statement from the question being answered. The distinction is load-bearing and it gets its own post.

If something here overreaches its source, that is a defect. The whole point of citing by key is that you can go and check.

Note — 2026-08-31

This post replaced a placeholder of the same date that existed to give the publishing machinery something to validate. The original made no claims and cited two sources purely to exercise the citation renderer; both have been removed along with it, and the post is now tiered A as a description of settled process rather than C. It is filed under method rather than audio-evoked potentials, which is what it was always about.