These are the rules the pages are built to. They are published because a directory asking institutions to be checkable should be checkable itself — and because most of them exist as the result of getting something wrong, which is set out on the corrections page.
A fact about an institution comes from that institution's published pages. A fact about a licensing board comes from the board, or from the state’s own statute or regulation, and then not at all. The Federation of Chiropractic Licensing Boards is linked and is never a source for a field, and it is never quoted. A field we cannot source says unverified rather than being filled from memory, from marketing copy, or from an aggregator.
Continuing-education vendors are never a source for what a board requires. They publish detailed, confident and mutually inconsistent accounts, and they are the most common origin of stale requirement figures in this subject.
Where an institution publishes cost components but no total, the components are listed and the missing total is stated. We do not add them up. A computed total is indistinguishable from a published one to a reader, and its composition would not match the totals other institutions publish.
Scope of practice is the field a reader most wants condensed into a sentence, and the one where a condensed version is most likely to be wrong in a way that costs somebody their license. Statutory exclusions are quoted from the statute or the field says nothing. They are never summarized and never taken from a secondary account.
Because an empty field makes you ask. A field filled with something plausible and wrong does not — it ends the reader's search at the wrong destination and looks like it worked.
This governs every field here, not only the ones that give a route. Where we are unsure, the field says so and stays empty, and that is a better outcome than a confident answer we have not checked. It is also why corrections to our own fields are published on the same terms as corrections to claims about institutions.
“We did not find it” and “it does not exist” are different statements, and only the first is ever ours to make. Absence in what we checked is not absence in the policy. An institution that does not publish something has not thereby been found to lack it.
And absence is only notable if you decided in advance that something should be there. No organization's absence from a list is recorded, because recording one and not the others gives it a status the others do not get.
Including the parked, the disallowed and the superseded. This rule exists because a claim was written four times while the answer sat in a file of ours marked “do not publish” — which had been read as “do not read.” Every version was researched carefully on the web; none was researched at home.
An abstract presented at a conference is a report of work in progress and has not been through the process a published article has. Of 776 abstracts presented at one chiropractic research conference, 249 went on to become published articles — and the study that established this also checked whether the published versions still said the same thing as the abstracts.
The rule: cite the full paper where one exists. Cite an abstract as an abstract, and say so in the citation. An abstract is never described here as a study, a finding, or evidence of a result.
Whether a journal is indexed in a given database is a fact about that database's inclusion criteria and about the journal's application to it. It is recorded as what it is and never used as a stand-in for whether research is good.
Where two publication venues in the same field are indexed differently, both are cited, each described in its own published words. If citation counts between them end up lopsided, the reason is stated in the method note rather than left for the ratio to imply.
A number allowed to speak for itself is an argument made without having to defend it, and this directory does not make arguments that way.
However public the source. A college publishing a student's name, or a student organization publishing its own officers, is not consent given to us. The rule is about our publication, not about what is already public elsewhere.
Nobody at all appears in the person directory without explicit written permission, and consent given for an educational interview years ago is not consent for a directory entry today. See the permissions page.
Where an institution publishes a named individual's contact details, we record that a named contact exists and where to find it. We do not reproduce the address. It costs a reader one click, and it means this directory never becomes a scraped address list.
If a fact is surfaced about one listed party and the equivalent fact is not surfaced about its peers, that is a judgment however neutrally it is worded. Either the fact is reported for everyone in a category or it is reported for nobody. Where a category-wide pass has not been done, the fact is held.
This rule has stopped four publications in the past month, including two that were true, sourced, and unflattering to the institution concerned. That is the cost of it and it is the reason it works. A rule that only ever prevents publishing weak material is not a rule, it is an editing standard.
A shorter entry means that body publishes less about itself, and the entry says so. Nothing is padded to look even and nothing is trimmed to look modest.
Wherever a page can point at a set instead of counting it, it does. A number describing a collection goes stale silently and nothing surfaces it — which happened four times on this project before the rule existed.
This page is one half of a pair. These are the rules that decide whether something may be published at all. The corrections page is what happens when they fail — every claim this site has narrowed or reversed, with what we said, what is true, and how we found out. A reader deciding whether to trust this directory should read both, and will learn more from the rules that cost us than from the ones that do not.
What money can and cannot buy is set out on the funding page.