How we test

Everything is bought

Retail price, ordinary purchase, no review units and no press accounts. A comped subscription hides the paywall, and the paywall is usually the most useful thing to report.

A measurement is not a claim

This is the rule the magazine was started over. When a company publishes a number about its own product, that is a claim. It may well be true. It is not a measurement, and we will not print it as though somebody independent had checked it.

Numbers appear here in one of three states, always labelled: ours, with the method stated; somebody else's, with that somebody named; or the maker's own, marked as such. Where a figure has been reproduced by a second party with no relationship to the first, we say so, because it is rare and it is the strongest form of the claim.

No advertising, no affiliate links

There is nothing to sell here and no commission on anything recommended. Outbound links to products carry rel="nofollow".

We say what we do not know

Where a subject needs expertise the writer lacks — clinical, legal, engineering — the piece says so and points at someone who has it. An unqualified confident answer is worse than an admitted gap.

Corrections

Printed on the piece, dated, describing what changed. Nothing is edited silently and nothing is deleted.