Methodology
What these pages are built from, how outcomes are normalised, what is checked before one is published, and what is withheld.
Where the data comes from
Every decision on these pages is a published record from a national health technology assessment body. The archive holds 23,433 decisions from 18 agencies. Each row links to the agency’s own source document; where an agency publishes in its own language, the indication is reproduced as the agency wrote it rather than translated.
How outcome classes are normalised
Agencies use different vocabularies, so each outcome is mapped to a common class. Recommended and restricted are treated as positive, not recommended as negative. Procedural records — a deferral, a non-submission, a withdrawal, an assessment superseded by another body — are kept separate and are never counted as a verdict either way. Several classes come from a single agency, so a sentence built on one of them would describe that agency’s paperwork rather than the molecule; those are excluded from the comparisons.
How these pages are generated
The pages are produced from the database under editorial rules, not written one at a time. Every figure is computed at build time and checked against the source rows: a page is not published if it contains a number the generator cannot account for. A page is also withheld if it carries fewer than 300 words specific to that molecule, fewer than 150 words of analysis that only applies to it, fewer than five decision rows, fewer than three links to source documents, or if it reads too much like another page in the set. Sentences that cannot be stated truthfully are omitted rather than softened.
No language model writes any part of these pages. Every sentence is produced by a rule that fires only when a specific condition holds in the data.
What is not here
Each page shows a selection of the decisions on file and says how many it is not showing, which agencies those span and how many further source documents they link to. The withheld rows are not present in the page in any form. Prices, confidential discounts and the full decision record are part of the subscription.
Dates are shown at the precision the agency published: some bodies record a year of decision and no day, and any interval quoted on a page carrying one of those is approximate to within a year.