Method

With the many competing claims in the health and nutrition world, most people want to know whether the books they read are factually accurate, but this can be hard to determine. Typical book reviews offer little help. To solve this problem, Red Pen Reviews has developed a unique, structured expert book review method designed to give readers an informative, consistent, and unbiased picture of a book’s factual accuracy. Our method helps you quickly assess the books you’re reading or are thinking about buying, and lets you compare books to one another on the same rating scale.

The Red Pen Reviews method scores books across three categories:

1) Scientific accuracy.   How well does current evidence support the book’s claims?
2) Reference accuracy.   How accurately does the book cite references?
3) Healthfulness.   Will the book’s advice improve your health?

Within each of these categories, we score the book on several criteria, then we average these subscores together to yield a category’s overall score. Then we average together the category scores to yield an overall score for the book. We display the overall and category scores at the top of each book review page, expressed as percentages. We also rate how easy or difficult it would be to follow a book’s advice: very difficult, fairly difficult, fairly easy, or very easy. Below the score, summary, and difficulty rating, we provide the full review and explain exactly how we arrived at each score.

Red Pen Reviews is committed to rigor and transparency, which is why we’ve published our full review method below. This is the exact guidance we use to evaluate and score the books we review.