Editorial standards
Sources and Evidence Standards
Not every link deserves equal weight. Grey Side prefers the underlying law, judgment, official publication or original study, then uses careful secondary context only where it genuinely helps you understand the record.
Last reviewed:
A source list is useful only when you know why each source is there. This page explains the hierarchy. Individual research and legal pages name the specific documents they rely on and state what each one supports.
The source hierarchy
- Primary law and official judgments: enacted text, rules, notifications and court decisions.
- Official health, public-policy and classification material from the body responsible for it.
- Original peer-reviewed research, read for what the study actually measured and what it did not.
- Systematic reviews, professional guidance and strong secondary analysis that accurately represents the underlying work.
- Reputable reporting for social context, never as a substitute for primary evidence when primary evidence exists.
- Community terminology and lived experience, clearly presented as context rather than universal fact.
Indian law and public policy
Legal pages begin with official Indian sources such as India Code, the Legislative Department, ministry publications and judgments published by the Supreme Court of India. A current-law check is performed near publication or substantive revision. The India legal guide carries the specific provisions and judgments used for its claims.
Health, psychology and research
Research pages prefer the original paper and use PubMed records to identify and verify biomedical and behavioural-science literature. Diagnostic language is checked against the relevant professional or international classification rather than inferred from a blog post. The BDSM psychology guide shows how those distinctions are handled in practice.
What a source cannot prove
One study does not settle a whole field. A correlation does not prove a cause. A clinical category does not define your identity, and an online anecdote cannot establish how common something is. When evidence is limited, mixed or indirect, the wording should say so instead of borrowing certainty from a citation.
Corrections and review dates
Pages involving law, medicine, psychology or research show a review date. That date records the latest substantive evidence check, not a promise that the world stopped changing afterward. If you spot a source that no longer supports the nearby wording, the right response is to correct the page and move the date only after checking the replacement.
Related reading
Sources
Government of India — India Code
Supports: Official repository used to locate enacted central legislation and provisions cited on legal pages.
Legislative Department, Ministry of Law and Justice — Legislative Department
Supports: Official publication source used to cross-check legislation and constitutional material.
Supreme Court of India — Judgments
Supports: Official court source used for judgments cited in the India legal context.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology — MeitY
Supports: Official source used for Indian digital-policy, privacy and notification material.
U.S. National Library of Medicine — PubMed
Supports: Bibliographic records used to identify and verify peer-reviewed research cited on evidence-sensitive pages.
World Health Organization — International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)
Supports: International classification reference used when a page discusses diagnostic categories or their limits.