About & methodology

BioTech Encyclopedia is a curated encyclopedia of what research has done with natural and inert materials: what has been tested, what has been built, and where it was reported.

How entries are made

• Curated, not scraped. Candidate papers are found with the open OpenAlex and Crossref APIs. A person reads each one and decides whether to include it.
• Original summaries. Every one-line summary is written for this site. We never reproduce abstracts, figures or text from the papers.
• "As reported in". Entries describe what the authors reported. They are not independent tests, endorsements, or product claims.
• Readiness tags. lab means lab samples or measurements. prototype means a made object or demonstrator. commercial means the paper studies a product or building already in real-world use. review means the paper summarises other studies rather than reporting new work. Each tag describes the paper itself, not the whole field.
• Verified identifiers. Every DOI is checked against Crossref (title and year) before an entry is published.
• Free-to-read links. Where Unpaywall or OpenAlex lists a legal free copy, we link it and label it: publisher open access, repository copy, or preprint/author manuscript (which may differ from the final published version). Otherwise the entry is marked Abstract only. We never host PDFs.
• No health or medical advice. Any biomedical research is described only as research.

Corrections

Science moves and summaries can be wrong. If an entry misstates a paper, has a broken DOI, or misses an important study, please report it (contact address to be added before launch). Corrections are logged and dated.

Data & credits

Citation metadata comes from Crossref and OpenAlex (CC0). Related open resources include the Materiom Commons for biomaterial recipes.