Editorial Standards
How I Run This Site
How the site is run, how content gets chosen and the standards I hold myself to.
Core Principles
Why This Site Exists
I'm a science teacher. I built this site because the programmes that got me into science are getting harder to put in front of a class and because a lot of them still teach better than anything made since.
The full story of why I started is on the About page. This page is about the rules I hold myself to, so you can decide for yourself whether to trust what you find here.
About Seriously Scientific →Getting the Science Right
Science is complicated and it's easy for a summary to overstate a finding or quietly drop the caveat that mattered. I work hard not to do that.
New writing and new lessons are built on peer-reviewed work, academic sources and institutional research. I'll tell you what a study found. I'll also tell you what it couldn't show.
Content Standards
Weight of Evidence
When I publish an article or build a lesson, I link the primary source, the actual paper or the actual data, so you can check me.
Weight of evidence matters too. New and unconventional ideas turn up in science all the time. If something is peer-reviewed and asks a good question I might cover it, but I'll always say where the consensus sits.
Handling the Classics
Much of this site is classic science programming, remastered. These shows are superb teaching tools, but science moves on. Showing students how it moves is half the point of the project.
So I leave the original broadcasts intact. Where the science has changed since, I say so around the episode rather than inside it:
Whose Work This Is
Seriously Scientific isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the producers, networks or rights holders of any programme on this site. Nobody involved in making those shows has any say in what I publish here.
I also want to be clear about what I am doing and what I am not. These programmes were made by some of the best people in their field. The remasters I make exist for one reason: so that a programme made in 1984 still plays properly on a classroom screen in 2026. I'm not claiming to improve on anything these shows achieved. The only aim is to show that work off, so that it isn't lost to history.
The lessons, questions and commentary built around the episodes are my own work. The episodes themselves are not and I would never suggest otherwise.
Where the Badge Comes From
Articles that cover a peer-reviewed paper carry a two-part badge: a letter for how well the study was done and a word for how far the finding has been checked by other people. The badge exists because a single mouse study and thirty years of replicated trials tend to get reported in much the same voice, and a reader deserves some help telling them apart.
I want to be plain about what this is. It's my own scale, built for this site. No journal, university or standards body has approved it, and there's no panel sitting behind it; it's one science teacher reading a paper and making a call against published criteria. Somebody applying those same criteria might reasonably land a grade away from where I did.
What I can promise is that the criteria are public and the reasoning is printed next to the badge. Every rated article shows the grade, the tier and a short note explaining the call. If you think I've got one wrong, there's a card in the sidebar for telling me so, and a good argument will change it.
Transparency
Who Pays for This
Right now this is one person, funded out of my own pocket. No sponsors, no grants, nobody with an opinion about which episodes I remaster or what I write.
If the site grows and the remastering bills grow with it, I may look at donations, Patreon or advertising. If that ever happens, you'll read about it here before you see it anywhere else.
How I Actually Use It
Thousands of hours of restoration, research and coding, done by one teacher, would not be possible without modern tools. I'd rather tell you exactly where they get used than leave you guessing. There are three places:
Accountability
Help Me Get It Right
I try hard to get things right but some things are bound to slip by occasionally. A complex study is easy to misread and a detail is easy to miss. If you've spotted a mistake, tell me. I'd far rather fix it than leave it sitting there. I'll say what changed when I do.
The same goes for anything else. If you have a question about the content on this site or about how any part of it is put together, the form below reaches me directly.
Get in Touch →The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman