This page describes how speechpathology.org produces, reviews, and maintains the content published across the site. It is written for the people who actually use that content: prospective and current speech-language pathology students working through program choices, certification steps, and early career decisions.
The sections that follow set out who writes for the site, how articles are reviewed before they go live, how factual claims are checked, which authoritative bodies we treat as primary sources, and how editorial independence is maintained. A closing section explains how readers can flag corrections.
How Articles Are Reviewed
Every article published on speechpathology.org receives a second-pass review by the SLP Editoral Team before it goes live. The first draft comes from the writer; the review exists to catch the things a single pass cannot reliably catch on its own.
What Reviewers Check
Reviewers work through the draft against three questions. Are the program details and licensure claims accurate as written? Is the explanation clear enough for a student who is encountering the material for the first time? And does the article align with the primary sources it draws from, rather than with secondary summaries of those sources?
Reviewers also step back and ask whether the piece actually answers the question a prospective student would be asking. A page on, for example, getting licensed in a particular state should help a reader understand what they need to do next, not restate generic background about the profession. If a draft drifts into background filler at the expense of the practical question, it gets sent back.
Flagging Overgeneralizations
A recurring flag is the overgeneralized claim. Licensure rules in speech-language pathology vary materially by state: supervised clinical hours, jurisprudence requirements, and continuing education differ in ways that matter to the reader. A sentence that reads cleanly in the abstract can be misleading the moment a student in a specific state acts on it. Reviewers mark these passages and ask the writer to either narrow the claim or add the state-level distinction. A guide aimed at readers considering slp programs in oregon, for instance, has to reflect that state's actual requirements, not a generic national summary.
Revisions and Ongoing Maintenance
Reviewers can return work for revision before publication, and revisions sometimes go through more than one pass. The goal is not speed; it is that the version readers see is the version the team is willing to stand behind.
Maintenance continues after publication. Pages tied to licensure rules, tuition, or employment data are revisited when the underlying facts change. When a source link surfaces as broken or redirected during review, the team re-verifies the underlying claim against the current primary source rather than simply swapping the link.
Fact Checking
Every quantitative claim on speechpathology.org is checked against a primary source before publication. That includes tuition figures, reported salaries, employment data, program length, accreditation status, and licensure requirements. If a number cannot be tied to an original publisher, it does not run.
Tracing Claims to the Original Publisher
We trace each figure back to the body that actually produced it rather than relying on a secondary aggregator or another editorial site that has summarized it. A salary figure, for example, is sourced from the federal labor statistics agency that collected it, not from a third-party site that republished the number. A program's accreditation status is confirmed against the accrediting council that issued it, not inferred from a school's marketing copy. This adds time to the review, but it shortens the chain between the reader and the underlying data.
Dating Figures to Their Source Year
Numbers shift, sometimes substantially, from one reporting cycle to the next. To help readers judge how current a figure is, each quantitative claim is dated to the publication year of the underlying source. When a more recent release becomes available, the figure is updated and the year is revised with it. This matters for the salary of speech language pathologists in particular, where reporting cycles can move the headline number year over year.
State-Level Variation
Licensure rules, supervised clinical fellowship requirements, and scope-of-practice details vary by state. For those claims, we check the issuing state board directly rather than summarizing requirements nationally. Where states differ in meaningful ways, we say so instead of averaging the difference away. The same principle applies to coverage of the SLP interstate compact, where state-by-state participation changes over time.
Resolving Conflicts and Handling Uncertainty
When primary sources disagree, we generally prefer the source closest to the original data collection, and we note the discrepancy if it matters to the reader's decision. If a claim cannot be verified with confidence, the SLP Editoral Team revises or removes it rather than softening it with vague qualifiers.
Sources We Cite
Our reporting on speech-language pathology education and careers leans on a small number of authoritative bodies. We go directly to these primary sources rather than relying on third-party summaries, and we cite them by name in the articles where their data appears.
Primary Bodies
Three organizations do most of the heavy lifting across the site:
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is our reference for certification and accreditation standards, including CCC-SLP eligibility requirements, the clinical fellowship, the Praxis examination in speech-language pathology, and which graduate programs hold accreditation from the Council on Academic Accreditation.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics is our reference for wage and employment figures. National and state-level salary ranges, employment counts, and projected job growth come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program and the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
- IPEDS / NCES is our reference for institution-level data: program enrollment, completions by award level, tuition and fees, and basic institutional characteristics for the schools we profile.
State Licensure Boards
Licensing rules vary meaningfully from state to state, and national overviews tend to lag behind board-level changes. For state-specific practice requirements, supervised hours, jurisprudence exams, and renewal rules, we go directly to the relevant state speech-language pathology licensure board rather than summarizing those rules through a national source.
How We Treat Secondary Sources
When we reference a news article, a university press release, or another secondary write-up, we treat it as a pointer rather than a citation. The job of a secondary source, in our workflow, is to lead us to the underlying primary document. Factual claims in the published article are anchored to that primary source, not to the intermediary.
Editorial Independence
Recommendations on speechpathology.org are not paid placements. The articles, program comparisons, and guides published here reflect the judgement of the SLP Editoral Team, applied against the criteria stated within each piece. Where commercial relationships exist between the site and any school or program, those relationships do not influence which programs are written about, how they are evaluated, or where they appear in editorial coverage.
Separation Between Editorial and Business Functions
The people who write and review content do not see, and are not informed of, which programs hold commercial relationships at the time assignments are made. Topic selection, program inclusion, ranking criteria, and editorial conclusions are handled on one track. Any business arrangements with schools or third parties are handled on a separate track. This separation is structural, not aspirational: a writer working on a state guide or a program comparison is given the research scope and the evaluation criteria, not a list of advertisers to favor or avoid.
How Inclusion Decisions Are Made
Whether a specific program appears in a ranking, list, or guide is determined by the criteria stated in that article. Those criteria typically include accreditation status, degree level, delivery format, location, and other factors relevant to the question the article is answering. A program is not added because it has a commercial relationship with the site, and a program is not removed because it does not. If a program meets the stated criteria, it is eligible for coverage on the same terms as any other. The same logic governs a state-level write-up of SLP programs in Missouri as it does a national look at accredited online SLP programs.
Sponsored Placements Are Labeled
Some page formats on speechpathology.org include sponsored placements, such as featured program units that sit alongside editorial content. Where this is the case, the placement is labeled so readers can clearly distinguish it from editorial coverage. Sponsored units are paid for; editorial coverage is not. Keeping that line visible to readers is part of how the site operates.
Corrections and Reader Feedback
Readers who spot a factual error in any article on speechpathology.org are invited to flag it for review. A short note describing the issue, and where possible the source that contradicts our claim, is enough to start the process. The SLP Editoral Team rechecks the claim against primary sources and responds.
Confirmed errors are corrected in place. When a correction materially changes a previously published statement, for example a revised licensure requirement, an updated tuition figure, or a changed program admissions rule, the change is noted on the page rather than silently overwritten, so readers can see that the guidance has shifted.
Feedback about clarity is treated with the same seriousness as factual corrections. If students tell us a passage was confusing, hard to follow, or left an obvious question unanswered, that note is logged and folded into the next revision cycle for the page.
