Excerpts credit research where the source is a book nobody here has read
Weaker than written — a claim stands, but we would now qualify it.
On thirteen pages, the excerpt — the first thing a reader sees, on the site and in email — credits “research” where the source behind the sentence is not research. Some credit authors who are not researchers at all: a habits writer, a success-magazine publisher, an investigative journalist whose reporting is good enough that we have now mistaken it for research twice. Some credit genuinely credentialed people for works that do not report research: a memoir, a self-help construct, a founding therapy text — a model text proposes; it does not show. Two pages are half right: one credits a real researcher’s own grounded-theory work beside a self-help construct, another pairs a claim that cashes to a real 2009 paper with one that rests on a habits book. And one page credits “research” for a therapeutic stance where the only thing our library holds is the 1995 book that founded the modality.
The rule these pages broke is simple: “research shows” must point at research we actually hold. A popular book by a researcher is that author’s telling, unchecked here; a book by a non-researcher is not research under any telling. Our repairs follow the difference: where no research stands behind the credit, the sentence is rewritten to say what the source actually is; where a real literature exists and we simply hold the popular book — four pages crediting a registered dietitian whose field has a peer-reviewed literature — the fix is pointing the credit at the research itself, not stripping an attribution that was never absurd.
Two larger, quieter populations were found beside these and deliberately not counted here: dozens of pages whose credits are accurate about a genuine researcher while resting on their popular book rather than their papers — a sourcing depth gap, being addressed by acquiring primary sources rather than by rewriting — and a set of unnamed “research shows” pages over book-only citations, still being read. Counting them as defects would have made the corpus say less than it knows; not naming them would have hidden the size of the practice. They are named.
Details
Affects 13 companion pages. 13 corrected.
Affected pages last measured 30 August 2026.
Affected companions
- The Accountability Gap — corrected
- The Self-Sabotage Pattern — corrected
- The Investor — corrected
- The Gardener — corrected
- The Intentional Eater — corrected
- The Hunger Scale — corrected
- The Phoenix — corrected
- The Last Meal Question — corrected
- The Core Problem — corrected
- The Identity Conflict — corrected
3 more…
- The Freezer Meal Stock — corrected
- The Blame Game — corrected
- The Meal Prep Setup — corrected