TitrateLab's research is reproducible because the inputs are reproducible. Below is the full list of external data sources we pull from, what we extract, how often we refresh, and what the current ingest totals look like in the live database.
Aggregated, anonymized signals from the Oedipus Discord fleet. No message content, usernames, or guild names are published. Refreshed from a sanitized aggregation every 5 minutes.
Independent labs, vendor pricelists, public forums, Telegram chat archives, our own editorial research, and the full Discord-fleet listening surface. Counts are live from the underlying databases, not curated marketing numbers.
Monthly hit counts for six families of compounds across all servers the fleet listens to. Continuous monitoring at current scale started Oct 2025 — earlier months come from select targeted backfills (high-value threads, vendor-review archives), so the dramatic ramp is partly real growth in chatter and partly the listening surface getting wider. Treat the trend, not the absolute level, as the signal pre-Oct-2025.
The primary inputs to our vendor-quality analysis are independent analytical labs. Neither vendor nor broker; a third party with no commercial relationship to the tested product.
Czech independent lab; the gold-standard direct-verification source that experienced grey-market buyers trust. We ingest test IDs surfaced in community forums, resolve PNG COAs, OCR via Haiku 4.5 vision, and cache every image locally to survive Janoshik's unpredictable image-purge cadence.
public.janoshik.com →Finnrick runs a rotating-aggregator-lab panel model and publishes summary reports. The single largest bloc of our COA corpus. Seven internal sub-labs (LabA–LabG) roll up under the Finnrick umbrella; we record which sub-panel produced each result so methodology-level comparisons (Finnrick vs Janoshik) are defensible.
finnrick.com →Buyers who pay out-of-pocket for HPLC sometimes drop the resulting COA image directly into Discord rather than Janoshik's public portal. Our scanner flags those image attachments and routes them through the same OCR pipeline as the Janoshik PNGs — structured output, attributable to a specific thread.
Vendor exit scams, quality issues, and early-warning signals almost always surface on community forums weeks before any press or regulatory record exists. We crawl the forums that carry the signal, extract referenced test URLs and vendor-warning threads, and feed them into the incident archive.
thinksteroids.com's Analytical Lab Testing subforum is the densest open-community concentration of Janoshik test URLs we've found. We walk the forum pagination, extract thread URLs, parse post bodies for verify.janoshik.com references, canonicalize and dedup, then route through the OCR pipeline.
thinksteroids.com →The dominant community forum for GLP-1-adjacent grey-market buying. Primary source for vendor-exit-scam first reports, impersonator warnings, and community-group tests. We scrape the full thread corpus, extract embedded Janoshik references, and parse vendor-warning threads into structured entries.
glp1forum.com →Bodybuilding forum with strong HGH + testosterone source-review coverage. Our crawler targets specific high-yield threads (blind-testing aggregates, vendor-review dossiers) rather than full-subforum walks; yields high-quality HGH COA URLs that don't surface in GLP-1 venues.
evolutionary.org →Our Discord monitoring infrastructure, codename Oedipus, reaches 1,000+ Discord servers spanning the major peptide, bodybuilding, and GLP-1 communities. Real-time listeners watch channels the fleet has been invited to — no scraping, no API rate-limit games. The scanner captures every message in every channel it reaches; a two-stage filter pipeline (regex + Claude Haiku enrichment) then distills the firehose down to peptide-relevant content.
Overwatch is our internal aggregation layer sitting between the Discord fleet and the COA discovery pipeline. It indexes every URL that passes through our messaging corpus (Telegram vendor channels, Discord community servers, forum cross-posts) and exposes a /api/urls/discover endpoint keyed by domain. When a buyer drops a verify.janoshik.com link into any of the 3.5M messages our fleet sees, Overwatch flags it in real time and routes it into the COA queue within the hour.
Most Chinese-origin peptide vendors publish pricelists and COA drops into Telegram channels rather than websites. Our infrastructure subscribes to the public distribution channels (we watch, never solicit), extracts pricelist PDFs and embedded Janoshik URLs, and routes them through Overwatch into the same pipeline as forum posts. Coverage is continuous for the 18 vendors in our catalog; full Telegram deep-indexing (beyond our direct vendor subs) is staged but not yet live.
Large grey-market conversation happens on Reddit that doesn't cross-post to the forums. Coverage is currently manual deep-dives via web search; full PRAW-based ingest is staged but not yet live.
Independent Substack writers (Krysia, edparker92) and retrospective blogs (PeptideExaminer, PeptideLaws, The Peptide Catalog) do durable investigative work that we cite and cross-reference. Monitored for new long-form publications that warrant archive entries.
The research articles cite trials, papers, and chemistry records. The scientific-literature pipeline pulls continuously from the authoritative biomedical databases, keyed on the peptides we track. Nothing here is scraped from summary pages — every record comes from the primary source's own API.
Biomedical literature — 36M+ citation records across the world's peer-reviewed health-science journals. We poll the NCBI E-utilities API for new papers mentioning each tracked peptide, fetch abstracts + MeSH terms, and surface as research-feed items inside the domain-knowledge layer. The Ambrus 2024 and Belcourt 2024 studies cited throughout the archive came from here.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov →The NIH-run registry of publicly and privately supported clinical studies. We monitor for new trials involving our tracked compounds — retatrutide, tirzepatide, semaglutide, cagrilintide, BPC-157, and others — and record phase, status changes, sponsor, and enrollment. Phase-III data shifts are the leading indicator for which grey-market compound will be legitimized next.
clinicaltrials.gov →Europe PMC aggregates the PubMed corpus with additional preprint servers (bioRxiv, medRxiv) and full-text open-access content. Captures preprints that haven't yet hit PubMed indexing — often the earliest public data-release on a trial or adverse-event signal.
europepmc.org →NIH's open chemistry database — molecular structures, properties, and biological-activity records. We pull compound records for every peptide in our tracked set so the domain-knowledge layer has authoritative structural data and canonical identifiers (CID, SMILES, InChI) alongside the grey-market supply-chain information.
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov →FDA's Structured Product Labeling (SPL) archive — every official drug label ever filed with the agency. Monitored for updates to the labels of the compounds that have approved pharmaceutical counterparts (Mounjaro, Wegovy, Ozempic). Label updates are the leading signal for emergent safety findings and indication changes.
dailymed.nlm.nih.gov →NIH's NCBI-hosted database of drug-induced liver-injury (DILI) monographs. When a peptide accumulates published hepatotoxicity case reports, it shows up here. Monitored weekly for any of our tracked compounds landing in a new monograph or causality update.
livertox.nih.gov →For DOJ prosecutions, FDA enforcement, and policy milestones, we source from primary records — court filings, Federal Register notices, agency press releases, and state AG actions. When a vendor hits the archive under "FDA enforcement" or "DOJ conviction," there's a paper trail.
The authoritative FDA index of warning letters. We monitor for peptide / GLP-1 / compounding-pharmacy letters, parse the cited violations, and add to the incident archive. The September 9, 2025 50+ letter wave came from this source.
fda.gov warning letters →DOJ's district-level US Attorney press releases announce peptide-related prosecutions. We monitor for named defendants, plea terms, forfeiture amounts, and lifetime-ban orders. Tailor Made Compounding, All American Peptide, Kawa/Stechkober — all sourced here.
justice.gov →Federal Register notices record the policy events that shape the grey market — Category 2 reclassifications, ITC General Exclusion Orders, compounding discretion announcements. We monitor the feed for peptide-adjacent notices.
federalregister.gov →State Attorneys General have started bringing civil actions against peptide vendors under state unfair-trade and unlicensed-pharmacy statutes. The Connecticut AG's action against Triggered Brand is one we've confirmed and added. Systematic 50-state coverage is pending.
naag.org →The pricelist database underpins the order-routing layer (coming post-launch). Continuously refreshed from vendor Telegram channels, homepages, and private distribution pages. Stale-flag trips at 90 days of silence; that's how BAOHUA landed in the Graveyard archive.
Structured SKU/price/stock snapshots for each vendor, indexed by country-of-origin and delivery destination. Drives both the internal order-optimizer (used by the shop bot) and the vendor-freshness monitor.
Most Chinese-origin vendors publish updated pricelists via Telegram, not their websites. Our scanner subscribes to the public distribution channels, extracts pricelist updates, and feeds them into the SKU table with timestamp + source attribution.
The research articles are the current visible layer. The order-routing, vendor leaderboard, and live alerts sit on top of these same feeds — all cited, all reproducible, all updated continuously.