Editorial standards

This portal publishes on food, growing and health, and it is read by teachers, project partners and reviewers who need to know where a statement came from. This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to. It exists because we have broken them before, and it is easier to fix that in public than to pretend otherwise.

What counts as a source here

• Peer-reviewed research, cited with enough detail to find it: authors, year, title, journal, volume and a DOI or other permanent identifier.
• Public bodies and regulators — EFSA, the European Commission and EUR-Lex, WHO, the NHS, national food safety agencies.
• University extension services, such as Penn State Extension and UF/IFAS, for practical growing guidance.
• Recognised specialist references for animal toxicity, such as the ASPCA.
• Our own project work and teaching experience — clearly labelled as ours, never dressed up as research.

We prefer open access, and where a paper is paywalled we say so next to the link rather than leaving you to discover it.

What does not count

Seed sellers, kit shops and produce vendors. Wellness and consumer-health publishers. Gardening blogs. Forums, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram. Auto-generated aggregator pages that assemble snippets without an author.

Vendor and user-generated pages are never used to support a health, safety, nutrition or toxicity claim. Not as a secondary reference, not as a convenient link, not under a heading reading “Sources”. If the only page saying something is a page selling something, that is not evidence, and we treat it as a reason for scepticism rather than support.

There is one exception, and it is narrow: we may point to a seller or a social post as an example of what the market claims, when the surrounding text says plainly that this is what we are doing. In that case the link is the subject of the sentence, not its evidence.

We never invent a reference

Every citation on this site has to be one a human or tool actually resolved — looked up in PubMed, Crossref, or on the issuing body’s own website — before it was published. We say this explicitly because we have twice caught fabricated references on this site: an author, title and journal invented around a real repository URL, and a fake article number derived from an identifier. Both were removed. A plausible-looking citation that nobody opened is worse than no citation, because it borrows credibility it has not earned.

A real paper attached to a claim it does not make is the same failure in a different costume. The check is not only “does this source exist” but “does it say this”.

Where the evidence is missing, we say so

Microgreens are a young research field with an old marketing industry attached. A lot of what circulates about them has never been measured. When we cannot source a claim, we do not soften it and keep it — we remove or narrow it, and leave a line on the page explaining what went and why.

You will find that language across the site: a figure we removed because we could not trace it; a warning we did not repeat because no case had been reported; a growing rule we dropped because only a seed company’s leaflet made the claim. Those notes are not admissions of weakness. They are the point.

How to report an error

Corrections are genuinely welcome, including small ones. Write to erasmus@evec.org.gr with the page address and what is wrong. If you can point to a source, please do; if you cannot, tell us anyway and we will look.

What happens next: we check the claim against the sources ourselves. If it is wrong, we fix it and note the change on the page rather than editing quietly. If it cannot be sourced either way, we remove it and say that we removed it. If we think the page is right, we will tell you why. You can also use the contact form if you prefer.

Reuse and licence

Our own content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may reuse, translate and adapt it, including commercially, provided you credit microgreens.org.gr and indicate any changes.

The licence covers what we wrote. It does not extend to logos, the EU emblem, or third-party material such as the papers we cite and images we license — those stay under their own terms. The full carve-outs are set out in our Terms of Use.

What we changed in July 2026

We audited the Science Library against the promise it makes on its own front page and found six articles still citing seed sellers, wellness publishers and gardening blogs. All six have been re-sourced. In several cases the fix meant removing a claim rather than replacing a link:

• Are microgreens miraculous? — five blog and business sources replaced with peer-reviewed reviews and Penn State Extension. Two unsourceable claims removed.
• Microgreens: a universe of flavors — five entries removed, including two seed-company PDFs. Three cultivation-and-flavour rules deleted as unmeasured.
• Sensory analysis in microgreens — a seed retailer removed and replaced with a peer-reviewed glucosinolate measurement.
• Microgreens vs sprouts vs baby leaves — the sprouted-seeds trade association link repointed to the hygiene guideline itself, hosted by the European Commission.
• Protein rich microgreens — Healthline and WebMD removed, measured protein data added, and the article now states that no published measurement of lentil microgreen protein could be found.
• Fermentation of microgreens — two blogs removed, and the gut-health passage rewritten to say clearly that no human trial has tested it.

That sweep covered the Science Library, which is where our research claims live and where the standard matters most. It did not cover the whole site. Older articles elsewhere — some recipe posts, and a group of 2025 lifestyle pieces on skincare, hair and weight loss — still carry links to consumer health publishers, gardening blogs and seed shops from before this policy existed. We know about them, they are being worked through in the same way, and until they are done this page describes the standard we hold and not yet a finished state.

If you find one we have missed, the address is above.