Library
Evidence grades
Every care guide, and every section in it, shows a letter for the strongest kind of source behind it. The letter grades the sources, not the animal or the advice.
The grades
| Grade | Meaning | Typical sources |
|---|---|---|
| A Peer-reviewed or veterinary reference | Backed by peer-reviewed literature or a veterinary reference text. | Merck Veterinary Manual, LafeberVet, journal articles |
| B Zoo or institutional guideline | Backed by a zoo, aquarium, museum, university or government guideline or reference. | Zoo species accounts, AZA/EAZA material, FDA, USFWS, university extension, The Reptile Database, CITES Species+ |
| C Expert consensus or hobby source | Backed only by expert opinion, veterinary clinic client articles, student-written references or hobby sources. | Exotic vet clinic handouts, PetMD, Animal Diversity Web, keeper and breeder sites |
| D Novel Fauna internal standard | No outside citation. It reflects Novel Fauna's own husbandry standard. | Uncited sections |
How grades are set
- A section gets the best grade among the sources it actually cites. A section with no citation is graded D.
- A guide gets the lowest grade among its care-critical sections: enclosure, temperature and lighting, humidity, substrate, diet and supplementation, health, and safety. One weak section is enough to lower the whole guide.
- Veterinary clinic client articles count as C. They are written by vets, but they are not peer-reviewed references.
- Publishers we have not classified yet count as C until an editor reviews them.
- Flags mark sections that rest on a single source, cite only C-grade sources, have no citation, or have paragraphs without a citation. These are the sections we plan to strengthen first.
- Current grades come from a classification of each guide's cited sources. An expert has not yet checked each claim against its source. The guide shows the date of that grading and its last content review separately.
Found a problem?
Every guide has a Report an issue form at the end. Reports go to an editor's review queue, and nothing on a guide changes until the editor has checked the report against sources. Each guide also lists its revision history.