Vendor verification process — how to get listed

paige_pharma said:

It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. It helps to ask what evidence would change your mind before you look at any. If nothing would, the discussion is not about evidence, and it is better to say so early than to spend nine posts discovering it.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

One concrete data point for the thread. Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look. It is a small discipline and it changes what you notice.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.

One thing that is still open after paige_pharma’s answer:

How people are distinguishing a supplier having a bad batch from a supplier on the way out?

lisa_labSD said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.

Closing the loop on my own question.

Update, and it is the boring outcome: nothing was wrong. The measurement I was reading had moved less than its own week-to-week variation, which somebody said upthread and I did not believe.