Sourcing policy

Priority

In descending order of preference:

The government or regulator whose decision it is
The national statistics agency that produced the figure
The intergovernmental body republishing it, where it adds definition
The official research organisation that ran the work
The primary peer-reviewed paper
A preprint, labelled as a preprint

A secondary report of an official decision is not a substitute for the decision. Where an item is about a regulation, we read and cite the operative text rather than a summary of it.

What a citation records

Each source carries its title, the organisation, the publication where relevant, the date the source itself bears, a URL, an official record identifier where one exists, the kind of source it is, and the date it was read. Where a source is cited for one specific claim, the page says which claim.

Nothing in a citation is inferred. A DOI that is not on the paper is not written down; an access date is the date the page was actually opened.

Citations are visible

Sources are rendered in the page HTML, not behind a disclosure or a tooltip. A reader without JavaScript, and a crawler, see the same list the reader with JavaScript sees.

When official sources disagree

We record the disagreement rather than resolving it silently. Choosing between two sourced values produces a judgement no source made, and publishing one of them alone destroys the reader’s ability to know the figure is contested.

Most apparent conflicts turn out to be definitional — two sources measuring different things under the same word. Where a page must show one figure, the choice follows a stated rule and the other value is named.

Absence

Where the record is silent, the page says the record is silent. Absence in AgricultureID is always a statement about AgricultureID and never a claim that the thing does not exist. The main platform’s coverage vocabulary distinguishes five kinds of not-knowing, and the Journal uses the same distinctions in prose.