Definitions

The badges on a record

Record tier

A number from 1 to 3 that says which group a record was built and published in. Tier 1 holds the longevity records and every medicine a register states was withdrawn, Tier 2 the remaining approved medicines, Tier 3 compounds recorded only as development candidates. The tier follows the kind of record, not its quality: a Tier 1 record with one recorded field stays Tier 1, and a Tier 3 record with several stays Tier 3.

Highest organism tested

The top rung of the organism ladder for which the record holds a cited study. It says where the evidence stops, not how strong it is.

Human data

Whether the record holds at least one registered human study or human publication. A record can hold human data and still hold no result: a registration is a study that was started, not a study that reported.

Supervision statement

Some records open with the classification a regulator gives the substance — prescription-only, controlled, or carrying a boxed warning. That classification is printed as the register states it. RNAWiki draws nothing further from it.

The organism ladder

The ladder has eight rungs. A rung is filled only where the record holds a study in that organism with a citation, and left open otherwise. An open rung is not a claim that the organism was tested and nothing found — it is the absence of a recorded study.

The rungs, lowest first

• Yeast
• C. elegans (roundworm)
• Drosophila (fruit fly)
• Mouse
• Rat
• Dog
• Non-human primate
• Human

What a filled rung was measuring

Lifespan

How long the animals lived was the recorded outcome.

Healthspan

A measure of function or disease burden over life was the recorded outcome.

Biomarker

A measured quantity in blood or tissue was the recorded outcome.

Surrogate

A stand-in measure was recorded in place of the outcome the reader cares about.

Mechanism only

The study recorded an effect on a pathway and no outcome in the animal.

The mouse rung is often filled from one programme, so its cohorts are listed together on the Interventions Testing Program page.

How a record shows what is missing

Recorded

A source states the value and the record carries it with that source, the date the source gives and the date it was last read.

Not recorded

No source RNAWiki reads states the value. Nothing is rendered for it: there is no empty heading and no placeholder line, so a short record is a short page.

Does not apply

The field cannot exist for this kind of substance — a patent status for a food ingredient, for example. It is stored apart from a missing value so that coverage figures do not count it as a gap.

Basic record

A record holding fewer than three recorded fields. It shows its identifiers and its relations, states how many fields it holds, and carries no derived questions. Search engines are asked not to index it.

Where a reviewed conclusion exists, five outcomes are kept apart and never merged: confirmed, mixed, contradicted, not measured, and unknown. Not measured means no study looked; unknown means studies exist and do not settle the question.

Spontaneous reports

A spontaneous report is a reaction someone — a patient, a doctor, a pharmacist, a manufacturer — sent to a regulator after taking or prescribing a medicine. Nobody was assigned to a treatment, no comparison group exists, and no one counts how many people took the medicine without reporting anything.

A count of spontaneous reports is therefore not a rate and not a risk. It cannot say how often a reaction happens, and it cannot show that the medicine caused it. Where a record shows these counts it labels them as spontaneous reports for that reason.

Which registers a record was checked against

A record’s regulator status is read from three registers: Drugs@FDA and the FDA Orange Book for the United States, the European Medicines Agency medicine list for the European Union, and the Health Canada Drug Product Database for Canada. A record names the ones that stated a status for it, and shows the register’s own record number and date beside each.

Four registers were never cleared for this corpus and are recorded as unknown on every record: the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and Singapore. The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration register could not be read under its own robots file, the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency publishes no licence statement for reuse, and no United Kingdom or Singapore register was cleared. This is a limit of what RNAWiki was permitted to read, not a finding about any medicine, so it is stated here once instead of on every record.

Identifiers and registry names

NCT number

The identifier a study receives on ClinicalTrials.gov, the United States registry of clinical studies. It identifies a study that was registered.

PMID

A PubMed identifier: the number a published article carries in the United States National Library of Medicine index.

UNII

Unique Ingredient Identifier, the code the United States Food and Drug Administration gives a substance. RNAWiki uses it as the first key when deciding that two names are the same substance.

ChEMBL ID, PubChem CID, CAS number, RxCUI

Substance codes from the ChEMBL database, the PubChem database, the Chemical Abstracts Service, and the RxNorm drug vocabulary. A record shows the ones it holds.

ATC class

The Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical classification, a grouping of medicines by the organ or system they act on and their chemical family.

How a statement is tied to its source

Each recorded value names one source: what kind of source it is, its identifier there, the date the source itself carries, and the date RNAWiki last read it. A quoted sentence is stored exactly as read.

A source link says which statement that source supports. It does not say the source proves the conclusion, and a source that changes later creates review work rather than silently rewriting a published record.

The five ways to browse

Substance class

What kind of substance the record is: its ATC group letter where ChEMBL records an ATC code, otherwise the class a register or listing states. ATC groups are shown by letter because the World Health Organization’s names for them are not licensed for this site. Open the substance class index

Longevity pathway

The pathway a cited sentence names for the substance. Open the longevity pathway index

Evidence reached

The highest organism a recorded finding used, and whether human data is on file. Open the evidence reached index

Regulatory status

What the United States, European Union and Canadian registers record. Open the regulatory status index

Record type

Which set of fields the record is kept under. Open the record type index

Sources and reuse

RNAWiki licenses its own selection, structure and wording under CC BY 4.0. Quoted passages and third-party records keep the terms in the table above.

Four things are recorded as unknown because their terms did not permit reading them: Australian register status, Japanese register status, the World Health Organization lists of international non-proprietary names, and patent status.

Editorial policy and corrections