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 to Tier V · Signal-level. It reads the study design, checks for retraction and index verification before scoring, and keeps study strength, source, and species applicability as three separate facts. A lower tier means earlier-stage, not lower-quality.
Most veterinary evidence lives in Tiers III to V, because strong trials are genuinely rare in this field.
A DOI, a PMCID, or a link to the article itself works too. One source at a time.
Most reliable: a PubMed ID or 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.
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, instead of collapsing them into one number: how strong the study is, whether its source can be trusted, and how applicable it is to your patient's species.
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 to 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.
A real citation is not necessarily strong evidence. Strong evidence in one species is not automatically an answer for another.
Paste up to 15 PubMed IDs, DOIs or PMCIDs, one per line, to assess a guideline's citations or the sources behind an AI answer. Also available as an API: POST /vecs/batch.
A tier places one clinical source on a five-step study-strength scale, from Tier I (Very strong) to Tier V (Signal-level). It describes how much confidence that study's design and evidence can support, as we were able to verify it, not how important the work is.
No. A lower tier means earlier-stage evidence, not lower-quality work. Most veterinary literature genuinely lives in Tiers III to V, and a well-run early study is still a Tier IV or V study.
An abstract advertises a study's strengths and rarely reports its flaws. When the abstract is all we can read, the top two tiers are not available, because nothing we could check would justify them.
A PubMed ID, a DOI, a PMCID, or a link to the article. A PubMed link or the DOI itself is the most reliable. Some publisher landing pages block automated fetching, and VetEvidence says so rather than guessing.
No. VECS assesses the strength of a source. It is a research aid that does not replace a clinician's judgment or a full reading of the paper. Confirm dosing, thresholds, and species rules against the primary source.