Editorial standards

Who may contribute

Contributors must hold a current professional license, bar admission or registration and must be in active practice. We publish physicians and surgeons, dentists and allied clinicians, admitted attorneys, CPAs and licensed financial advisors, licensed engineers and registered architects, and comparable credentialed practitioners in real estate, insurance and risk.

A contributor writes only inside their own scope. An employment attorney does not file on securities regulation, and no one writes clinical guidance for a specialty they do not practise. Where a piece reaches beyond the author’s scope, we ask them to narrow it or we decline it.

What we verify

Identity. We confirm the person exists, practises where they say they practise, and is reachable at a business address and telephone line we can independently find — not a contact form.

Licensure. We check the license, admission or registration against the issuing board or registry, and we record the reference alongside the article. Where a registry is not publicly searchable, we require documentation from the issuing body.

Authorship. Submissions must come from the professional themselves. We do not accept agency copy filed under a practitioner’s name, and we do not accept generated drafts presented as a contributor’s own work.

Disclosure. Any commercial interest, referral relationship, expert-witness engagement or client relationship touching the subject must be declared at submission. Declared interests are printed with the article. Undeclared interests discovered later are grounds for removal.

Vetting is not a one-time formality. A contributor who has published here twenty times is checked on the twenty-first submission.

What we decline

• Promotional pieces written to sell a service, however professionally worded
• Ghostwritten copy, syndicated content, or material published elsewhere first
• Advice outside the contributor’s licensed scope of practice
• Claims about a named person, firm or product we cannot see support for
• Clinical, legal or financial instruction addressed to an individual reader’s situation
• Anything a reader could mistake for a professional relationship with the author

How we edit

We do not rewrite. Accepted articles run in the contributor’s own words, in the structure they submitted. Editors check the headline against the body, query anything unsupported, fix typographical errors, and apply house formatting.

If a piece needs substantive rewriting to meet our standards, we decline it and say why. Returning a manuscript is not a judgement on the professional; it usually means the argument needed more of their experience in it and less of the internet’s.

Disclosure and independence

Placement is an editorial decision, made on the strength of the writing. Contributors are professionals writing under their own names about their own fields; where a contributor stands to gain commercially from a subject, that interest is disclosed on the article itself so readers can weigh it.

Corrections and removal

Errors of fact are corrected promptly and marked openly. Contributors may request removal of their own work at any time; subjects of an article may request a correction or a right of reply. The process is set out in our corrections policy.