How Blossom decides what to include

For registered clinical trials, the aim is broad coverage. If a trial is registered publicly and studies a psychedelic compound, including ketamine, Blossom should try to track it. Trial registries are where the field declares what it intends to test, before results are published and before a company or research group has a finished story to tell.

In practice, this means following ClinicalTrials.gov and other registries, then reviewing what the automated discovery process finds. The claim is an aspiration, not a guarantee of perfect visibility. Public registries differ in quality, access, language, and structure, and some records are easier to discover than others.

Papers need a different standard. Psychedelic science now produces clinical reports, reviews, commentaries, survey papers, neuroimaging studies, animal studies, policy analyses, and preprints. Adding all of them would make the database larger, but not necessarily clearer.

Blossom generally includes human trial papers and then uses editorial judgement for the rest. The question is whether a paper carries research signal: does it add useful evidence, clarify a live question, open up a newer topic, or help readers understand how the field is changing?

That is why a first serious review of psychedelics for OCD may belong in the database, while another narrow review of psilocybin for depression in a very specific professional audience may not. The point is not whether the paper is good or bad. The point is whether it adds enough signal for a reader using Blossom to understand the field.

Ketamine sits partly inside and partly outside the psychedelic medicine conversation. It is central to many mental health and drug-development questions, and Blossom tracks registered ketamine trials broadly. But the ketamine paper literature is much larger than psychedelic medicine: anaesthesia, surgery, pain management, pharmacology, and routine clinical uses all generate a high volume of papers.

For ketamine papers, Blossom is therefore more selective. Strong human studies, large trials, important safety work, and field-shaping reviews may be included. Routine or highly narrow papers outside the psychedelic medicine context usually are not.

Inclusion does not mean endorsement. Negative findings, null results, careful criticism, adverse-event papers, and studies that complicate the optimistic story can all be important. A database that only collects positive or convenient papers would be less useful.

The same applies in reverse. Some papers may be relevant to psychedelics but still not add much signal for Blossom readers. Curation is the attempt to keep that distinction visible.

Blossom uses automated discovery to watch public sources, surface candidate papers and trials, and keep up with a field that changes every week. That helps catch work that a manual search might miss.

But automation is not the editorial standard. Human review still matters, especially for borderline papers, ambiguous ketamine records, and work that is relevant only in a narrow context. The goal is not to make the database as large as possible. The goal is to make the evidence easier to follow.