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How we check sources and correct errors

How SIDEfxHUB checks official texts and studies, how often they are checked again, how our translations are made, and how to report an error to us.

Who writes this site

SIDEfxHUB is a UK registered charity (number 1203385) for people harmed by lasting effects of medicines. It is a patient charity, not a team of health professionals, and nothing on the site replaces medical advice.

We use AI tools to find sources, to compare every quotation with its source character by character, and to translate and read our pages in seven languages. No health professional has reviewed these pages.

Every row of our label table shows the document it comes from and the day it was checked.

The sources we use

For each fact we use the strongest source we can open, and we name it in plain words in the article, with a link to it:

  • The official texts themselves: a medicine’s leaflet and label, and the documents that medicines regulators publish.
  • Studies published in medical journals, and the researchers who wrote them. We say what a study found, and we do not present a figure as a fact about every patient.
  • Public bodies such as the NHS, and answers given by governments in parliament, as what they say.
  • Patients, in their own words. What a person tells us is shown as their account, with their consent.

Articles written to our current guide follow these rules. Some older articles do not yet link their sources.

How a fact is checked

For the label table, we opened each text on the day shown in its row under “Checked”. Every quotation was copied from the text as it stands. A second, separate check followed: each source was opened again, and every quotation was compared with it character by character. Where the two differed, the row was corrected from the source or left out.

Where we could not open a text, the row says so and gives the reason. Nothing is carried over from one country to another: we do not work out what one country’s text says from another’s. Where a text’s terms of use do not allow quoting, as in Australia, the row gives our summary in our own words and says so.

Before a new or rewritten article is published, it goes through three separate review rounds. In one of them, every source is opened again and every number is checked against it.

How often texts are checked again

Every row of the label table shows its “Checked” date, so you can see how fresh it is. Our record marks each row as due for a new check 31 days after that date. Each time the site is built, it reports which rows have passed that point.

When a check finds nothing new, only the “Checked” date moves. A page’s “Updated” date moves only when what it says has changed.

A text can change after the day we checked it. For the current version, the source link in each row goes to the official text.

How translations are made

The site is published in seven languages. Articles are written in English first. Once the English is final, AI tools translate it into German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Hindi. A second AI reader then reads each translation, as a separate step: first on its own, as a reader in that country would read it, then line by line against the English. Each language follows a written house style. No professional translator has checked our translations.

Quotations from official texts are never replaced by our translation. The table shows the original words, with our translation under it. Each of our translations was checked a second time against the original. Where the body that issued a text has published its own version in a language, the table shows that version and says so.

How errors are corrected

If you find an error, write to contact@sidefxhub.com. Tell us the page and what you think is wrong.

We open the source again. If the page is wrong, we correct it. When we have verified a new document from a regulator or a company about one of these medicines, it is added to What changed.

What we never do

  • We never advise anyone to start, stop or change the dose of a medicine. Do not stop a prescribed medicine without talking to the person who prescribed it.
  • We never state how often a side effect happens beyond what a source says. Where nobody has measured it, we say that, and we do not call it rare.
  • We never rank or score countries or regulators. The label table is a record of what each text says, in a fixed order.

Where to find the record