Citing the paper

Most figures that circulate under Veale's name are cited loosely, or attributed to the wrong claim entirely. The paper is specific about what it pooled and what it reports, and a citation that does not match that specificity is misleading whether or not the number itself is correct. This is the short version of getting it right.

The reference itself

The paper is Veale, D., Miles, S., Bramley, S., Muir, G. and Hodsoll, J. (2015), "Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15,521 men", published in BJU International. It is a meta-analysis: a pooled analysis of multiple prior studies, not a single new measurement study, and citing it as if it were one original dataset understates what it actually did. If you are including a DOI or a direct link, verify it against the publisher's own record before publishing it - an unverified DOI copied from a secondary source is a common way small citation errors spread.

A citation should also carry the population studied, not just the authors and the year, because "Veale 2015" on its own does not distinguish which of the several figures the paper reports - flaccid, stretched or erect length, or girth - a given sentence is drawing on. A precise citation names the state as well as the paper: "13.2 cm (SD 1.6), erect length, Veale et al. 2015" carries more information than "Veale 2015 found 13.2 cm," and it is the difference between a citation a reader can check and one they have to take on faith.

The journal and year matter too, not as decoration but because they are what let a reader locate the actual table. "Veale 2015" without the journal name is enough to search for, but citing BJU International specifically rules out confusion with any other paper by an author with the same surname published the same year - an unlikely collision, but citations exist precisely to remove that kind of ambiguity rather than to rely on it being unlikely.

What can honestly be attributed to it

Veale 2015 can be cited for: the pooled means and standard deviations for flaccid, stretched and erect length and for girth, drawn only from studies where a health professional took the measurement; the nomograms built from those figures; and the paper's own stated limitations, which its authors list explicitly. What the paper actually pooled, study by study, is covered in full elsewhere if you need to trace a specific figure back to its contributing studies.

What gets misattributed to it

Self-reported figures, country averages, or any number from a survey rather than a clinician-measured study do not belong to Veale 2015, even when a secondary source cites them next to a Veale figure as if comparable. The paper's entire selection rule was to exclude self-reported and non-clinician-measured data from its pool, so a self-report figure appearing beside a Veale citation, without a separate source of its own, is almost always a sign the secondary source has blurred two different literatures together. Country league tables are the most common offender: they mix self-reported surveys with clinician-measured studies and then rank the results as if all the figures came from one comparable pool, and attributing the whole table to Veale because one row in it happens to match a Veale figure is a citation error worth catching before it is repeated.

Citing a figure without the paper in hand

If you cannot verify a specific number against the paper itself, the honest move is to describe the direction the literature reports rather than repeat a magnitude you have not checked. A citation is not more credible for including decimal places you have not confirmed - what a table's error column actually says about precision applies as much to citations as to the readings behind them.

None of this bears on subjective judgements from a photograph or a human viewer. Rate Cock and services like it produce those on entirely different terms, and neither Veale 2015 nor any measured study could confirm or contradict a numeric score built from an image, a human judge's verdict, or what an AI model reads from a photograph - none of them are the kind of claim a citation to this paper could support.