Direct answer
PelvicEx maintains internal authorship, editing, and quality-control records. AI assistance, automated checks, source ledgers, and repository history support that work but do not substitute for accountable editorial decisions or appropriate clinical care.
This policy explains the responsibilities attached to authorship, editing, fact checking, and clinical review. Contributor credits identify the work performed, the content version, and the relevant scope. Attribution helps readers understand who is responsible for publishing decisions and which expertise applies to a particular page.
Editorial accountability
The content library uses AI-assisted research, drafting, editing, and validation inside a developer-managed repository. Sources are catalogued, and automated checks examine structure, citations, product claims, originality, assets, and localization. Those controls can expose certain errors, but they cannot provide clinical judgement or accept professional responsibility. Editorial responsibility includes choosing the question, rejecting unsupported claims, maintaining source links, applying safety rules, and deciding whether a page is fit to publish. When a claim changes, the affected evidence, examples, related guides, and translations are checked together. Public attribution is added only when a real contributor has agreed to be named for a defined role and version. Readers should be able to distinguish PelvicEx publishing decisions from cited research, clinical care, product advertising, and an individual professional’s independent opinion.
Public pages identify PelvicEx as the publisher and avoid unverified claims of medical authorship, clinical approval, or specialist endorsement. Topic risk levels guide internal quality-control work without appearing as authority claims on the page.
What each role means
An author is accountable for the original intellectual contribution and final content attributed to that person. An editor improves scope, organization, readability, consistency, and adherence to the editorial standard. A fact checker verifies claim-to-source alignment and records corrections without necessarily judging clinical suitability. A clinical reviewer evaluates the page within a declared professional scope, population, jurisdiction, and review date.
These roles may overlap only when that overlap is stated. A developer who fixes rendering is not automatically a health editor. A person with lived experience can make an important contribution without being presented as a clinician. A licensed professional is not automatically qualified to review every pelvic-health topic; prostate surgery, obstetric injury, bowel dysfunction, sexual pain, and exercise programming can require different expertise.
Verification before a name is published
PelvicEx does not accept a credential from self-description alone. Contributor attribution requires verification of the person’s identity, relevant qualification, current registration or licensure where applicable, declared jurisdiction, conflicts of interest, the scope of the contribution, and permission to publish the attribution. Expired, unverifiable, or irrelevant credentials must not support a clinical-review claim.
The credit should identify what happened: authored, edited, fact checked, clinically reviewed, translated, or reviewed a translation. It should also show the review date and apply only to the actual version examined. Reviewing one guide does not approve the entire library, related pages, translated adaptations, app behavior, or later edits.
Professional review workflow
A substantive clinical review should give the reviewer the page, source list, evidence boundaries, intended audience, content level, and known product limitations. The reviewer should be able to challenge the premise, request source changes, narrow claims, add safety routing, reject a page, or require a different specialty. Approval should be recorded against a content version or source hash.
Material changes require the English and translated versions to be checked again for meaning, caution, anatomy, and care pathways. Each language adaptation is checked independently rather than assuming that one version guarantees another.
AI is not an author or reviewer
The ICMJE recommendations on AI in publishing state that AI tools cannot be authors because they cannot take responsibility for accuracy, integrity, conflicts, or copyright. PelvicEx follows that accountability distinction. An AI system may help organize evidence or draft text, but it cannot hold a licence, consent to attribution, disclose a conflict, or approve medical advice.
Likewise, “AI reviewed” is not a substitute for peer review or clinical review. The ICMJE responsibilities for peer review emphasize human responsibility and confidentiality in formal publishing processes. PelvicEx is not a peer-reviewed journal and must not borrow that language to inflate its current controls.
Conflicts and commercial context
PelvicEx’s commercial model centers on advertising to support free pelvic-floor exercise education. Contributor disclosures must account for relevant commercial relationships. Advertising, affiliate arrangements, product comparisons, and subscription plans must not determine evidence conclusions, safety boundaries, or editorial decisions. Source selection and corrections follow the same independence standard. A commercial relationship does not establish the effectiveness of an exercise or its suitability for a particular reader.
Contributors must disclose relevant employment, consulting, device or app interests, referral relationships, grants, intellectual property, and other interests that could reasonably affect the topic. Disclosure does not automatically disqualify a contributor, but hidden interests undermine the value of the credit.
Sources
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Use of Artificial Intelligence in Publishing.
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process.
- PelvicEx guide metadata, evidence catalog, and repository workflow, inspected 1 September 2026. Internal first-party disclosure.