Methodology
The labels themselves — what S, H, A, M and R mean and why the scheme names the kind of study rather than ranking it — are on Evidence codes.
How a study gets in
Every study passes through the same four steps before it's added:
- Source -- candidates are found via PubMed, prioritizing landmark discovery papers, systematic reviews and large human RCTs over secondary commentary; bioRxiv supplies preprints (always flagged as such, never treated as equivalent to peer-reviewed work), and ClinicalTrials.gov supplies ongoing human trials.
- Verify -- each citation's PMID, DOI, year and journal are confirmed against PubMed's own metadata before the entry is written; no citation is added from memory alone.
- Label -- the study gets an evidence code naming the system the claim actually rests on (S/H/A/M/R), not a mark for how good it is. Until September 2026 these codes ran A–D; they were renamed because a lettered ladder is read as a school grade however it is captioned, and that quietly devalued molecular work that the pathway was built on. See the changelog.
- Link -- the genes, drugs and outcomes the study mentions are connected to it in the graph, so the same paper surfaces wherever any of its subjects is explored.
Every DOI resolves to the publisher's own page (Nature, Cell, Science, NEJM, Lancet and others), so any claim traces back to the original paper in one click.
Inclusion & exclusion criteria
A study earns a place if it does at least one of four things: establishes a landmark mechanism in mTOR biology; supplies the strongest available human evidence for a claim (a systematic review or a large RCT, not an isolated small trial); fills in representative animal or mechanistic work for a pathway node that would otherwise be uncovered; or reports a negative or null result that the rest of the literature tends to under-report -- included deliberately, since a database that only shows what worked misrepresents the actual state of the science.
A candidate is left out if it's a secondary commentary, editorial or news piece rather than a primary study or review; if it duplicates a pathway node already covered by a stronger study and adds no new claim; if its metadata can't be verified against PubMed (no PMID or DOI resolving to the publisher's own record); or if its connection to mTOR is incidental -- mTOR measured as one readout among many in a paper about something else. Preprints and registered trials are admitted only when they're the best available evidence for a claim, and then carry their own PP/RT marker rather than an S/H/A/M/R evidence code.
What this doesn't guarantee
An honest limitation: the Atlas does not keep a screening log. Candidates that were considered and rejected leave no record, so no exclusion count can be quoted or inferred. That's a real weakness compared with a systematic review, where the screening flow is itself evidence that the search was unbiased -- here it isn't. Selection is a judgement call, made paper by paper, and it is not currently auditable from the outside. The Atlas should be read as a curated reading list with grades attached, not as a systematic review of the mTOR literature. Logging rejected candidates and the reason is a planned change.
Who reviews the selection: one person, the curator. There is no second reviewer or independent adjudication of borderline calls -- the usual safeguard against a single reader's blind spots is absent.
How often it updates
An automated job screens PubMed for new candidate mTOR studies and relevant conferences once daily, but the corpus changes only when a human accepts a candidate -- typically a handful of papers a month, sometimes none. The exact timestamp of the live corpus is printed in the footer of every page, and every count on this site, including the ones above, is computed from that snapshot rather than typed in by hand.
Corrections log
Every recorded correction to a study record -- what changed and why -- is public at /changelog/: a checkable list, not a claim to take on faith.