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Tinnitus Clarified

Research database

Every source cited on this site, searchable

This site’s editorial policy is that every factual claim traces to a named, checkable source. This page is that promise made browsable: 404 sources, filterable by what kind of study they are and who published them, each showing which of our articles depend on it.

Built automatically from the articles themselves, so it cannot drift out of step with what we actually cite. Study types are derived from each citation’s own wording and its publisher — never assigned by us. Where a citation does not state its design, it is marked unclassified rather than guessed at. Read more on how we weigh evidence.

Foundational studies

The handful of papers that most of this site rests on, summarised twice — once plainly, once in the original technical terms.

Cima RFF, Maes IH, Joore MA, et al. (2012). The Lancet 379(9830):1951–1959.

A large trial (492 people) found that a structured, CBT-based stepped-care program worked better than standard care at reducing how much tinnitus actually bothered people — not by making the sound go away, but by changing its impact on daily life.

Read the source →

Fuller T, Cima R, Langguth B, et al. (2020). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD012614.

A Cochrane review — the strictest kind of evidence review — looked across all the good CBT trials for tinnitus and found real, if moderate, benefit for tinnitus-related distress, though not a cure and not every trial was strong.

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Okamoto H, Stracke H, Stoll W, Pantev C (2010). PNAS 107(3):1207–1210.

A small study found that listening daily to music with a gap cut out at your exact tinnitus pitch, for a year, made tinnitus sound quieter and calmed down the related brain activity — the original evidence behind notched sound therapy.

Read the source →

Systematic review and meta-analysis (2024). European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology.

Pooling multiple notched-sound-therapy trials together, this review found it can make tinnitus sound a bit quieter after a few months, but didn't find good evidence it reduces overall distress compared to just listening to regular music.

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Dillard LK, Arunda MO, Lopez-Perez L, et al. (2022). BMJ Global Health 7:e010501.

Pooling data from 33 studies and over 19,000 people, this review estimated more than a billion young people worldwide are at risk of hearing loss from listening to personal devices and loud venues too loud, too long.

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Hobeika L, Gunasekera K, Ficek B, et al. (2025). Nature Communications.

Using the huge UK Biobank health database, researchers found just over 1 in 5 people report tinnitus, rising with age, with men reporting it slightly more often but women reporting it as more distressing.

Read the source →

World Health Organization. Deafness and Hearing Loss Fact Sheet.

The WHO's own figures: over 1.5 billion people currently live with some degree of hearing loss, a number expected to pass 2.5 billion by 2050 as the global population ages.

Read the source →

The full database

Everything cited anywhere on the site. Sorted by how many of our articles rely on each source, which is a reasonable proxy for how central it is to what we publish.

Source type

404 sources

What this database is not

It is not a ranking of study quality. A paper in a strong journal can still be a small, poorly controlled study, and being cited often here means it is central to our coverage — not that it is the best evidence available. Where we do judge strength, we do it per claim inside the articles, using the Tinnitus Clarified Evidence Rating, which is our own scale and endorsed by nobody.

Two labels are worth filtering on deliberately. Commercial or vendor marks pages belonging to clinics, device makers, retailers, insurers and law firms. The label is applied by host, never by whether we think the citation was justified — so you can check us rather than take our word for it. When we first built this filter it returned 33 sources; auditing them found a factual error we had picked up from a law firm’s marketing page, which is now logged as a correction. Filter by it now and you should find only a handful, each one where the vendor genuinely is the right source: what an app does, or what an insurer covers. Preprint or repository marks work that had not been peer-reviewed at the point we linked to it. Both are legitimate in the right place; neither should be mistaken for a trial.

It is also not a list of studies you can join — this is what has already been published, not what is recruiting. For that, see finding a tinnitus clinical trial, which explains how to search the registry and how to read a listing once you find one.

It is also not a complete map of tinnitus research. It contains what this site cites, which is a fraction of the field. If a source you expected is missing, that is a genuine gap in our coverage rather than a filtering error — tell us, and if something we published is wrong we log it publicly on the corrections page.