Sources and licensing
Every study NatureHQ cites points at exactly one source, and for every source we set down what may and may not be done with it.
The reference details, and NatureHQ’s own reading of the work. Full text is never reproduced. The pattern the site relies on is discover, verify, extract the factual intelligence, explain it independently, and cite — which only works if we can see, per source, what we are and are not permitted to do.
Of 720 studies, 663 carry a reference number confirmed against Crossref or OpenAlex. A reference number is attached only where an exact title, a matching author and an uncontradicted year all agree — a number that leads to the wrong paper is worse than no number at all, and one that has not been checked cannot be published here.
Sources that may support a claim
Peer-reviewed research and authoritative reference bodies.
Nature Portfolio
Peer-reviewed primary research and review articles across Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Ecology & Evolution and Nature Plants.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Peer-reviewed primary research in Science and the open-access Science Advances.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Peer-reviewed primary research, with a strong record in animal cognition and neuroscience.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Cell Press
Peer-reviewed primary research across Current Biology, Cell and iScience.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Elsevier journals
Peer-reviewed primary research including Animal Behaviour, Applied Animal Behaviour Science and the Trends series.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Springer journals
Peer-reviewed primary research including Animal Cognition and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
The Company of Biologists
Peer-reviewed research in the Journal of Experimental Biology, a core source for sensory biology.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Public Library of Science
Fully open-access peer-reviewed research; one of the few sources whose text NatureHQ could reuse if it ever needed to.
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 · Full text: permitted with attribution · Attribution required
PeerJ
Open-access peer-reviewed research with published peer-review history, which makes the review process itself inspectable.
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 · Full text: permitted with attribution · Attribution required
eLife Sciences Publications
Open-access peer-reviewed research that publishes editorial assessments and reviews alongside the paper, so the strength of a result can be read rather than assumed. A useful home for replications and negative results.
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 · Full text: permitted with attribution · Attribution required
Wiley journals
Peer-reviewed research including Ecology Letters and New Phytologist.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
The Royal Society
Peer-reviewed research in Proceedings B and Biology Letters.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Government science agencies
Research documents and advisory reports from national agencies — fisheries, wildlife, geological surveys. Often the only published home for decades-long population monitoring, and usually absent from Crossref, so work cited from here is expected to carry no reference number at all rather than to be waiting for one.
Licence: not stated · Full text: restricted · Attribution required
De Gruyter journals
Peer-reviewed research in long-established specialist journals, notably Mammalia for mammalogy. Narrow use: NatureHQ holds this source for findings that have no home in the larger publishers already covered.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Brill journals
Peer-reviewed research in long-established specialist journals, notably Behaviour for ethology. Narrow use, as with De Gruyter: held for findings that have no home in the larger publishers already covered.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Canadian Science Publishing
Peer-reviewed research in the NRC Research Press journals, notably the Canadian Journal of Forest Research for forest pathology and stand-scale fungal ecology.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
University press journals
Peer-reviewed journals published by university presses — The Biological Bulletin, The American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology and others. Distinct from source:university-press-offices, which covers institutional press releases and is not a source of truth.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Learned society journals
Journals published by scientific societies rather than by commercial houses or university presses — the American Physiological Society, the Society for Experimental Biology and their equivalents. Editorially independent and peer-reviewed; treated exactly as other primary journals are, and separated only so that a paper is not filed under a publisher it does not have.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Annual Reviews
Commissioned review journals. Useful where NatureHQ needs the settled state of a field rather than a single result — and treated as synthesis, never as the primary evidence for a specific finding.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
JAMA Network
Medical literature; relevant to NatureHQ where comparative biology meets human medicine.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Academic book publishers
Scholarly monographs that consolidate a research programme, such as von Frisch on the honey-bee dance language. Cited for what they established; superseded on any point where later research disagrees.
Licence: not stated · Full text: prohibited · Attribution required
Public-domain scientific works
Historical monographs out of copyright, such as Darwin and von Frisch. Used for the history of a subject, never as current evidence.
Licence: Public Domain · Full text: permitted
bioRxiv
Preprints. Legitimate evidence, but never presentable as established: anything from here carries preprint status through to the reader.
Licence: not stated · Full text: restricted · Attribution required
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Species occurrence records. Authoritative for distribution, with the caveat that occurrence data reflect where people looked as much as where animals are.
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 · Full text: restricted · Attribution required
Catalogue of Life
Consensus taxonomic backbone. The intended authority for scientific names and classification.
Licence: CC-BY-4.0 · Full text: permitted with attribution · Attribution required
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
The authority for conservation status. Assessments are dated and taxon-specific, and NatureHQ records both alongside the category.
Licence: not stated · Full text: restricted · Attribution required
National and international public health agencies
The authority for what a member of the public should actually do about a health risk from an animal — rabies exposure above all. NatureHQ summarises the shape of that guidance and its jurisdictional variation, and never restates a dose, a schedule or a treatment decision. Those belong to a clinician with the patient in front of them.
Licence: not stated · Full text: restricted · Attribution required
Sources that may not support a claim
Useful for finding research or gauging attention. Never the scientific basis of anything.
News media tells us what people are reading, and therefore what they are about to search for. University press offices tell us a study exists and is getting attention; they routinely overstate it, so the underlying paper is always located first. Catalogues of published work establish that a paper exists and what it is called, not what it found. None of them can be marked here as a scientific source of truth.
Crossref
Registers reference numbers and the details that go with them. This is what NatureHQ checks a citation against; it establishes that a paper exists and what it is called, not what it found.
OpenAlex
An open catalogue of published work, its authors and what cites what. Used for finding related research and work that supersedes what we already cite.
Europe PMC
Literature search across life-science journals and preprints, including retraction and correction notices — the mechanism by which NatureHQ would learn a cited paper had been withdrawn.
University and institutional press offices
Discovery signal: press releases tell us a study exists and is getting attention. They routinely overstate it, so the underlying paper is always located before anything is written.
Science and news media
Demand and trend evidence only: what people are reading, and therefore what they are about to search for. Never the scientific basis of a claim.
- Evidence standards — what each confidence label means
- All research — every study NatureHQ cites