Methodology
Sources and provenance
What a source record contains, how records are linked to sources, and what happens when a source disappears.
Updated Sep 1, 2026
The platform's standard is that every conclusion should have a visible path back to evidence. For data, that path is the source record.
What a source record contains
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| URL | Where the document was retrieved from |
| Title, publisher | As printed on the document |
| Type | Official publication, procurement notice, contract document, budget document, statistical publication, court document, company filing, official API, third-party dataset, news, other |
| Publication date | As stated by the publisher |
| Retrieval date | When QinMetrics retrieved the document |
| Content hash | SHA-256 of the retrieved file, when a copy was stored |
| Archive copy | Address of an archived copy, when one was taken |
| Licence | The terms the publisher states for the document |
The retrieval date matters because public records are edited and removed. A value on this platform is a claim about what a document said on a given day, and the source record makes that day explicit.
Linking records to sources
Any record can be linked to any number of sources. Each link is marked:
- primary for the document the record's values were taken from;
- supporting for documents that corroborate or add to it;
- derived-from for a source that was itself processed by QinMetrics to produce the record, such as a third-party dataset.
Entity pages show these links in a Sources panel. Records without a primary source are not published.
Preserving what does not fit
Sources contain fields that the core model has no column for. Those fields
are preserved verbatim under attributes on the record, keyed by the name the
source used. Nothing is discarded at ingestion; the model decides what is
comparable across sources, not what is kept.
Names and scripts
Where the official name of an organisation or jurisdiction is in a script other than Latin, the record stores both the original name with its language tag and an English form. The English form is a transliteration or an official translation, and the dataset's notes say which.
When a source disappears
If a source URL stops resolving, the record and its source link remain, the retrieval date stands, and the archive copy is shown where one exists. The platform does not delete records because their source was withdrawn; it does mark the source as no longer available.