Sources
The rule
Every figure on this site is traceable to a named primary source, and every source is listed. If a number appears here without a source you can open, that is a defect — tell us and we will fix it.
What counts as a source
Peer-reviewed primary literature, first.
Where a claim touches regulation, enforcement or guidance, we also cite the primary document itself — a regulator’s filing, a guideline, a court record — and we mark those separately from research, because they establish a different kind of fact.
Press releases, news coverage and secondary summaries are not sources. They are how we sometimes find a source.
Verification
Every DOI cited here is checked against the registry before publication. A citation that does not resolve does not go on the page.
Numbers that describe our own scanning — how many channels, how many claims, over what window — come from an immutable snapshot written by the scan that produced them. A figure that cannot be traced back to the run that produced it does not get published. We learned this the hard way; the first entry on our corrections page is why.
Copyright, and why our charts look like ours
Facts are not copyrightable; expression is. We restate findings in our own words and we do not reproduce full text from articles.
Figures and tables in papers carry their own protection, so we do not lift them. Every chart on this site is rebuilt from the numbers as reported, and labelled with the source it came from.
Where an article is openly licensed, the licence still varies per article, and we read it per article rather than assuming.
When sources disagree
We publish the disagreement. A field that has not settled a question is a finding, not a gap to be smoothed over — and it is usually the most useful thing on the page.
Access
Some of what we cite sits behind a paywall. We link the DOI regardless, so you can verify the citation exists and reach the abstract, and we quote enough of what it reports for the argument to be checkable without it.