How we rank

Ordering rules for every list in this directory, stated in full so they can be checked against what you actually see.

What determines the order

Average published review rating, where a listing has published reviews. Listings without reviews sort after those with them; they are not penalised beyond that.
Number of published reviews, as a tie-break — a rating over more reviews is a more reliable one.
Name, alphabetically, as the final tie-break so the order is stable and reproducible rather than arbitrary.

The rating is the plain mean of the overall rating a reviewer gave. It is not weighted by recency, reviewer status, facet scores or anything else.

What plays no part

Whether the clinic is a Vitrify Software customer.
Any payment, of any kind. There is no paid placement and no mechanism to buy one.
Whether the profile has been claimed.
Clinical outcomes. No such figure is held anywhere in this directory.

Aggregate ratings

An average rating is shown only once a listing has at least three published reviews. A five-star average over one review is technically true and practically misleading, so it is not displayed and not marked up. A group or chain page never shows an aggregate rating at all — a chain-level score is an arithmetic artefact, not something anyone actually reviewed.

The Vitrify Score

There are three measures in this directory and none of them is a rating. The Vitrify Score below is about a doctor, is drawn as a ring, and carries a category word. The Vitrify Clinic Score is about a clinic and grades how much is known about it and how well that is evidenced. Listing completeness is about a clinic listing, is drawn as a bar, carries no category word and passes no judgement on the clinic — it counts how much has been published. A doctor page carries the first. A clinic page carries the second and the third, and never the first. None of the three plays any part in the order of any list.

Each doctor profile carries a score out of 100. It measures how much this directory knows about a clinician and how well that knowledge is evidenced. It is not a measure of treatment outcomes, success rates or clinical quality, and no factor in it reads anything that could stand in for one. It plays no part in the order of any list — the ordering rules above are the whole of the ordering rules.

The seven factors

Factor	Weight	What it reads
Experience	20	Years in practice, as recorded on the profile. Saturates at 25 years.
Fertility specialisation	20	Whether the doctor's recorded specialties are fertility specialties, and whether one of them is their primary specialty.
Patient reviews	15	The mean of published reviews, drawn toward the middle of the scale until enough of them exist. Not computed below three published reviews — the same threshold that governs whether an average rating is displayed at all.
Verification	15	How far the listing has been verified, whether the council registration was checked against the register, and how recently a person last re-confirmed the record.
Profile completeness	10	Ten fields that make a profile usable: qualifications, biography, languages, photograph, practice, role, specialty, experience, registration and years at the practice.
Publications	10	A researched count of indexed peer-reviewed papers. A count may only be held at all if a cited source records it.
Clinic affiliation and accreditation	10	Of the clinics a doctor practises at, the strongest on four inputs: ART registration validity, whether the clinic has its own laboratory, whether it has its own pharmacy, and the breadth of ART treatments it offers.

What “accreditation” means here, and what it does not. This directory holds no accreditation data of any kind. There is no NABH, NABL or JCI record in it, and no field to put one in. The accreditation half of that factor rests entirely on a clinic’s ART registration — its registration number, the authority that issued it, and whether that registration has expired. An ART registration is a legal requirement to operate, not an accreditation, and it is a weaker signal than an accreditation would be. The factor is named as it is because the heading would otherwise imply more than the data holds.

A factor that cannot be computed leaves the total

Not every fact is known about every doctor. When a factor cannot be computed it is dropped, and it takes its weight out of the total with it: a doctor with no published reviews is scored out of 85, not marked down out of 100. Absence is never scored as zero. Each card says how many of the seven factors went into its score, and the panel beside the list names the ones that did not.

Two factors can never drop. Verification is always known, because every published listing has a verification state. Completeness is always known, because an empty profile is genuinely nought out of ten for completeness — that one is a measurement rather than a gap.

Where a factor is computed but the answer is nothing — a cited publication count of zero, a clinic with no ART treatment recorded against it — it scores zero, because that is a finding rather than an absence. The distinction between “we looked and there is none” and “nobody has looked” is the one this whole design turns on.

When it was computed

A score is computed and stored, not derived when the page loads: the seven factor values, the total, the number of factors used and the version of the formula that produced them are all kept on the record. A score shown on a Tuesday can therefore still be explained on a Friday, after the formula has moved on.

Fees, response times, availability and publications

Four values on each card have no per-doctor fact behind them in most cases. Rather than print a number anyway, each follows the same ladder: a real fact where one exists, otherwise a benchmark about the city clearly marked as such, otherwise an invitation to fill the gap.

Consultation fee. A fee published by the clinic, with the date it was published, where one exists. Otherwise the typical range for the city, marked City typical — a fact about the market, not about the doctor. The clinic sets its own fee and it varies by case.
Response time. Always the city benchmark, never a per-doctor figure. Nothing in this directory measures how quickly any clinic replies, so no such claim is made about a named clinician.
Availability. The clinic’s own published opening hours where it has published them, otherwise the usual opening pattern for the city. Never a next appointment slot: there is no calendar integration anywhere in this directory and there is no way to know.
Publications. The researched count where a source cites one, otherwise an invitation to add it.

Every benchmark carries the number of clinics it was derived from, the date it was derived and its source. A blank on a profile is an invitation to complete it, and nothing more: an incomplete profile is never ranked lower for being incomplete, because ordering is rating, review count and name, and nothing else.

Editorial note. Registry details are sourced from the National ART & Surrogacy Registry and corroborated against what the clinic publishes. Opening hours are the clinic's own, cited to its website. Partner plans unlock more detail but never change the methodology. Success rates are not published here — read how we rank.

Verified against cited public sources
No paid placement, ever