About
A global network of scientists fact-checking health and medical news
Health Feedback is a worldwide network of scientists who collectively assess the credibility of influential health media coverage.
Our mission
Our first mission is to help Internet users—from the general public to influential decision-makers—distinguish inaccurate health information from scientifically sound and trustworthy information in the media. We also provide feedback to editors about the credibility of information published in their outlets.
Our mission is pedagogical: we strive to explain whether and why information is or is not consistent with the science. We are nonpartisan and apply the same methodology to claims made in a variety of media. We believe it is scientists’ civic duty to better inform our fellow citizens in our area of expertise.
Who we are
Each of our reviewers holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals. They are asked to conform to high quality community standards to contribute to our analyses.
- Meet our reviewers
- Read our community standards
What we do
We invite scientists with relevant expertise to use web-annotation to mark up health media articles, adding contextual information and highlighting factual inaccuracies and faulty reasoning where they exist.
To complete the analysis, scientists evaluate articles and provide a credibility score based on accuracy, logic, objectivity, and factual precision; giving readers an overall guide to the scientific credibility of the article.
- Learn more about our process and our guidelines to evaluate scientific credibility
Health Feedback editors provide a clearly stated summary of the scientists’ comments. We call these analyses ‘Scientific Feedbacks’. All Feedbacks are archived on our site, creating a useful resource for anyone to easily compare and contrast the credibility of different news sources and promoting the most reliable sources of information and insightful journalism.
Beyond fact-checking
Health Feedback is paving the way for a new kind of fact-checking, crowdsourced directly among scientists with relevant expertise, providing in-depth analysis on a whole article, as well as “fact-checking” a number of claims at once.
Beyond checking the facts, special attention is given to checking the quality of the logic and reasoning to analyze and expose logical flaws and rhetorical manipulation.