Evidence earns visibility. Payment never does.

1. Programme identity comes first

A hospital position, society-directory row, recurring grant, observership and travelling fellowship are not interchangeable. Before publication, duplicate calls and aliases are connected to one canonical decision profile. Host centres within a single application pathway are not counted as separate fellowships unless the official source describes distinct applications.

2. Source hierarchy

Current programme, hospital, university, regulator, accreditor and professional-society pages are preferred. Historical pages and official PDFs may establish programme history but do not prove a current intake. Search-result snippets, copied directories and unsourced social posts are not treated as sufficient programme evidence.

3. Claims are reviewed field by field

Programme existence, current application status, deadline, duration, funding, clinical participation, eligibility, registration, visa requirements, application route, faculty and accreditation each keep a separate evidence state. Evidence for one field is not reused to fill another. “Not published” is a visible result, not an invitation to infer an answer.

4. Search-index quality threshold

A current programme profile must reach an evidence-completeness score of at least 60% before it enters the XML sitemap and becomes indexable. The score rewards useful, sourced decision fields—not promotional language. Archived profiles and lower-evidence records remain followable but are marked noindex. This threshold may be raised as research coverage improves.

5. Dates, updates and corrections

Profiles display a checked date and link to the source used for the review. A current checked date means the linked evidence was reviewed; it does not guarantee that every field is published or that the next intake is open. Institutions and readers can submit an evidence-backed correction through the moderated correction route. Submissions cannot change public data automatically.

6. Authorship and assisted research

Editorial responsibility belongs to the named OrthoFellow editor. Software and assisted research workflows may help locate, structure, compare and test records, but they do not turn an unsupported statement into a verified fact. Public claims must remain traceable to the displayed source, and automated checks are used to find duplicate routes, missing metadata, invalid structured data and broken internal links.

7. Medical and applicant-safety boundary

OrthoFellow provides educational directory information, not clinical care, admissions advice, immigration advice or a licensing decision. Programme titles do not establish hands-on permission. Applicants must confirm current eligibility, registration, credentialing, visa, funding and clinical privileges with the host and relevant authorities before acting.

8. Advertising safeguards

Current technical status: Google-served advertising is disabled; the AdSense meta tag remains only for site-ownership verification during review.

• Payment cannot buy programme inclusion, a verification badge, a higher completeness score, favourable wording or search rank.
• Sponsored or promoted material must be labelled before the reader acts.
• The ad loader is limited to selected public directory hubs, guides and data reports. It is excluded from fellowship profiles, private dashboards, forms, account workflows, legal pages and error pages.
• Editorial selections and data-derived findings are not paid placements.
• A Google-certified consent management platform must be confirmed ready before Google ad serving is enabled for affected regions.

9. What the directory does not claim

Coverage is not presented as every fellowship in every country. Registry inclusion is not converted into accreditation, a vacancy, salary, visa sponsorship or international eligibility unless the relevant official evidence supports that exact claim. Profile completeness measures information coverage, not programme quality.