Sources & methodology
Last reviewed 2026-08-13
This site's promise is simple: every fact carries a citation and a date, and unknowns are labeled instead of guessed. This page explains how that works.
Where facts come from
Sources are ranked. Higher-ranked sources win conflicts:
- Primary law: statutes, administrative codes, and bills on official legislature and code sites. Practice-status citations link here.
- Official bodies: state medical boards, CAAHEP, NCCAA, ARC-AA, and CASAA publications.
- Program publications: each program's own admissions, tuition, and outcomes pages.
- Professional organizations: AAAA and ASA materials, used as corroboration rather than primary proof.
- Labeled third-party data: job-posting scrapes, self-reported salaries, and trackers. These are always labeled as what they are and never presented as official statistics.
How verification works
Facts are researched from multiple independent starting points, then checked adversarially: a second pass attempts to disprove each claim and to fetch each citation before anything is published. Every page shows a last-verified date. The goal is to re-verify every cell at least every 90 days, and staleness is shown rather than hidden.
The site's data lives in version control, and the changelog is generated from that history. A fact cannot change without leaving a public record.
Confidence levels
- High: primary sources confirm the claim directly. No banner is shown.
- Medium: the substance is solid but some element rests on indirect sourcing, such as a seat count from a third-party tracker. The page says so.
- Low: published information is incomplete or unconfirmed, common for brand-new programs. The page carries a visible banner and the notes explain what is uncertain.
Data labels
Numbers are labeled by what they measure: advertised (from job postings), self-reported (unaudited submissions), program-published (marketing without stated methodology), and official (government or certifying-body statistics). The salary page shows why the distinction matters.
Corrections
If something here is wrong or out of date, email [email protected] with a source. Corrections ship as data edits, so they appear in the changelog like everything else.
Credits: US map geometry adapted from a public-domain (CC0) Wikimedia Commons base.