Editorial policy

The editorial wall

The Cited has an editorial wall between the people who write and the people who do business. As of launch, those are the same person (Slav). The wall is enforced by disclosure: every standing relationship is listed publicly on the author bio page, and every article that touches a disclosed relationship carries a banner at the top.

What gets disclosed

• Financial — paid sponsorships, affiliate commission, equity, advisory roles, paid speaking, prior employment at a brand mentioned in the article.
• Material — free product access, gifted access to a research tool, an embargo, a relationship with a PR firm that pitched the story.
• Editorial — when a draft was reviewed by someone outside the author list before publication.

Disclosure is by default visible: a colored banner above the article body, plus a line in the author bio block at the bottom. We do not bury disclosure in a sidebar or behind a tooltip.

What we don't accept

• No paid placements in editorial copy. Sponsored content, when we run it, will live on a separate URL prefix (/sponsored/) and be marked at the URL, the banner, and the Schema.org tag (@type: AdvertorialContent).
• No comp'd travel or events without an article-level disclosure.
• No agency-supplied quotes. Every quote is attributed and confirmed with the named person before publication.

Use of AI

We use LLMs as research tools — for prompt probing, draft outlines, summarising large datasets, and code review. We do not publish LLM-generated articles. Where an LLM materially contributed (e.g., it suggested the article structure, or it drafted the table of test prompts), the article carries a "How we wrote this" block noting which model and which task.

Corrections

Every cornerstone article has a changelog block at the bottom showing every substantive edit since publication, with date and a one-line reason. We don't silently rewrite. For corrections we judge as material (changes a stated number, a recommendation, or an attribution), we additionally:

• add an UPDATED banner at the top of the article for 14 days;
• note the correction in the next weekly newsletter;
• update the dataset and bump updatedAt in the article's frontmatter so downstream consumers see a fresh signal.

Takedowns and right-of-reply

If you're named in an article and believe a stated fact is wrong, email corrections@geosalience.com with the specific claim and the evidence. We commit to:

• responding within 5 working days;
• either correcting the article (with attribution to the report) or explaining publicly, in the same article, why we're standing by the original claim.

We do not take down published articles that have been factually contested without replacing them with a correction note at the same URL.

Right of reply

When an article makes a substantive claim about a named brand, the brand is contacted before publication and offered a 200-word right-of-reply that we publish unedited inside the article if they respond before the publication deadline.

Source confidentiality

We protect sources to the limit of the law. If a story relies on confidential material, the disclosure block notes that "a source familiar with X provided Y" and the article explains why anonymity is justified (commercial sensitivity, personal risk, etc.).

Reach out

For editorial questions, write to editor@geosalience.com. For corrections, write to corrections@geosalience.com.