Methodology
How we find, evaluate, and present TCM research — from source selection to automated evidence grading and quality checks.
Source Discovery & Monitoring
We continuously monitor 231 sources including major medical journals (The Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, Nature Medicine), specialist TCM publications (Journal of Acupuncture and Meridian Studies, Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine), and reputable news outlets covering health science.
Our automated pipeline checks each source every 15 minutes. New publications are ingested within one hour of being indexed by the source journal's online system.
Relevance Filtering
Not every article from our monitored sources is relevant to TCM. Each article is filtered for topical relevance — by title, keywords, and study focus — so that the index stays centred on acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine rather than passing mentions.
Articles that pass the relevance threshold are forwarded to evidence grading. Borderline cases are flagged for re-scoring.
Evidence Grading
We apply a five-tier evidence hierarchy adapted from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (OCEBM) 2011 Levels of Evidence, calibrated specifically for TCM research:
Automated Quality Checks
Every article is graded automatically against the five-tier evidence hierarchy. The system assesses study design and reported metadata — sample size, blinding, follow-up, and study type — and extracts conflict-of-interest disclosures from the original publication to assign and label an evidence level.
All articles are published with automated evidence metadata and remain subject to community reporting. Flagged articles are re-checked within 48 hours.
Transparency & Corrections
We believe in full transparency. All grading decisions are logged with timestamps. When original studies are corrected or retracted, we update our records within 24 hours and add a visible notice to the article.
To report an error or concern, please contact us.
Clinical Review & Editorial Oversight
Our clinical guides, condition summaries and decision-support tools are curated and reviewed under Dr. Kerem AL, a licensed acupuncturist and Traditional Chinese Medicine physician with classical training in East Asian medicine and an active private clinical practice.
The aim is that every clinical guide and tool output reflects both classical theory and the current weight of evidence — under qualified, licensed oversight rather than anonymous automation. The tools remain clinical decision-support, not a substitute for a clinician's own examination and judgement.
Copyright, Attribution & Sources
We respect the rights of publishers and authors. For each indexed study we show factual bibliographic details (title, authors, journal, year, identifiers) together with a short snippet, and we always link out to the full text at the original source — we do not reproduce full abstracts or articles. Read the full text and abstract on the publisher's site.
We crawl responsibly: our pipeline honours each source's robots.txt and text-and-data-mining opt-out signals, and links out rather than framing or embedding source pages. qiboo.ai is an independent platform and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the journals, publishers, or news outlets we reference; their names are used for identification only.
For full details on attribution, fair use, and how to request a correction or takedown, see our copyright & takedown policy.