Setting the standard for evidence in veterinary AI.
How ready is this paper to guide a decision?
Paste a PubMed ID, DOI, PMCID, or an article link, and VECS places a veterinary source on a five-tier study-strength scale — from Tier I · Very strong down to Tier V · Signal-level. It reads the study design, checks for retraction and index verificationbefore scoring, and keeps study strength, source, and species applicability as three separate facts. A lower tier means earlier-stage, not lower-quality.
Try a live example
Most reliable: a PubMed ID/link, or the DOI itself — typed directly, or
already in a publisher link (Wiley, Springer, BMC, Frontiers, Taylor & Francis all put it right in
the URL). A plain publisher landing page (e.g. Elsevier/ScienceDirect,
MDPI) sometimes gets blocked by that site's own bot protection — we'll tell you exactly why if it
happens, no need to guess. Google Scholar's own pages can't be fetched
directly (Scholar blocks that) — copy the DOI from its "Cite" popup instead.
What is VECS?
VECS — the Veterinary Evidence Confidence Score — places an individual clinical source (a paper, guideline, or label) on a five-tier study-strength scale, from Tier I · Very strong to Tier V · Signal-level. Built for veterinary medicine, it keeps three separate facts apart — how strong the study is, whether its source can be trusted, and how applicable it is to your patient's species — instead of collapsing them into one number. A tier describes this one paper as we could verify it, not how important the work is: a lower tier means earlier-stage evidence, and most veterinary literature genuinely lives in Tiers III–V. Sources we can only read as an abstract are capped at Tier III, because an abstract advertises a study's strengths while omitting its flaws.
I · Very strong
II · Strong
III · Moderate
IV · Preliminary
V · Signal-level
Tap or hover a tier to see what it means.
Grade a reference list
Paste up to 15 PubMed IDs / DOIs / PMCIDs (one per line) — grade a guideline's citations, or the sources behind an AI answer, in one pass. Also available as an API: POST /vecs/batch.
VECS grades each source on evidence design, execution quality, source verifiability, species applicability, and recency. The scoring methodology and weights are proprietary and withheld pending publication of our calibration data.
VECS grades the strength of a source — it is a research aid, not medical advice, and does not replace a clinician's judgment or a full reading of the paper. Always confirm dosing, thresholds, and species rules against the primary source.
Developed by OpenVet as open-source evidence support for the veterinary community. Field-influence data via OpenAlex; source metadata via NCBI E-utilities and Crossref.