Sources & Citations Policy

1. What we cite

Every factual claim that a reader might reasonably want to verify — a number, a mechanism, a recommendation attributed to an organization, a study finding — is cited inline and linked to the primary source. Our full source hierarchy is documented on the Research Methodology page; in short, we prioritize:

1. Government and clinical-society consensus documents (NIH, CDC, AASM, NIOSH, FDA, WHO).
2. Peer-reviewed research and systematic reviews (PubMed, Cochrane, Sleep, Chronobiology International).
3. Textbooks and university sleep-lab resources for explanation.

2. What we will not cite

• Content farms and unattributed listicles.
• Product-marketing pages presenting their own claims as evidence.
• AI-generated summaries with no traceable underlying source.
• Predatory-journal papers or preprints without any independent replication (with rare, clearly-flagged exceptions).
• Forum threads, personal blogs, and social-media posts as evidence for medical claims (we may still link to them as color or opinion, clearly labeled).

3. How citations appear on the page

We use two complementary patterns:

• Inline hyperlinks — the specific phrase or number that came from a source is linked directly to that source, in the sentence where the claim appears. No hunting through a footer to figure out which fact came from where.
• "Sources" block at the end of long guides — a consolidated, human-readable list of the key primary references used in the guide, with organization / journal name and publication year.

Every outbound source link opens the actual page on the source's own domain — we do not shorten, mask, or affiliate-tag citations.

4. Quotations

Direct quotations are placed in quotation marks and attributed by name to the person or organization who said them, with a link to the original. We keep quotations short — long block quotes are used only when the original phrasing is genuinely doing work that a paraphrase can't.

5. Link stability & the archive rule

Web pages disappear. When a cited source is at meaningful risk of link rot — a small research group's PDF, a press release on a company blog — we archive the page via a public web-archive service and note the archive date, so the claim remains verifiable even if the original URL goes dark.

6. Affiliate and sponsored links are not citations

NappyTi.me publishes no affiliate links and no sponsored placements, so every outbound link in a guide is either a source citation or a link to another page on this site. If a commercial link is ever added, it will be disclosed and kept visually and semantically separate from source citations.

7. Reader verifiability

Our test for a good citation: could a curious reader with no medical background click one link and, within a minute, see the exact place our claim comes from? If the answer is no, the citation isn't good enough yet.

If you ever hit a citation that fails this test, please report it via the Corrections Policy — that's exactly the kind of thing we want to fix.