What a deep dive is, and why every quotation in one is checked

The rest of this site answers questions about one thing at a time. A molecule page says what a compound is. A news story says what one document did, on the day it did it. Those are the right shapes for most of what we publish, and they are the wrong shape for a question whose answer is spread across thirty years and a dozen documents.

This section is for those. One long piece per question, written by hand, with the sources attached.

Every quotation here has been checked against its own document, by a machine

This is the part worth knowing before you read anything else in this section.

When one of these articles quotes a document, that quotation is recorded separately from the prose, alongside the address of the document it came from. Before the article can be published, a program fetches every one of those documents and checks that every quotation appears in it, word for word. If one does not, the article does not publish. If a quotation is later edited in the prose and no longer matches, the same check fails. It runs again on demand, so a document that changes underneath a published article gets caught too.

It is the same code that verifies the quoted excerpts on the molecule pages, which is the point: there is one standard here, not a stricter one for the pages nobody argues with.

What it cannot catch is the thing no program catches. A quotation can be perfectly accurate and still be used to support a claim its author never made. That is a judgement, it needs a person, and if you think one of these articles has done it, say so in the comments under it. We would rather be corrected in public than be wrong quietly.

What these articles try to do

Give you the primary document. Where a claim rests on a Federal Register rule, a court filing, a toxicology report or a paper, the citation goes to that, not to the news coverage of it. Follow the numbers.

Say which kind of evidence it is. In rats is not in people. In vitro is not in rats. A case report is not a study. Those words are not hedging, they are the content, and you will find them everywhere in this section.

Name who said a thing, and when. Not "it has been suggested". Not "experts say".

Show disagreement instead of resolving it. Where two credible documents say different things, the article says both and cites both. Picking a side silently is the single easiest way to write something that reads well and is wrong.

Give both dates when the record was corrected. A claim made loudly in May and quietly withdrawn in September is two events, and the gap between them is usually the most informative number in the story.

What they are not

They are not news. News is dated to the day something happened and is never edited afterwards; a deep dive is an argument and gets updated when the evidence does, with the date on it.

They are not opinion pieces, and they are not advocacy. Several of these articles are about subjects where this site's readers have strong views, and some of them will land somewhere those readers do not want. If the evidence for a comfortable conclusion is thin, the article says the evidence is thin.

They are not a substitute for reading the documents. They are a map to them.

The figure in the artwork

The illustrations in this section carry a recurring figure, drawn as construction geometry rather than as a character. It is a visual signature for the section and nothing more. It has no opinions, it does not narrate, and it never appears in the text. If you were wondering whether a mascot was about to start talking to you: no.