Citation Policy

Every factual claim on this site is supposed to be checkable by someone who does not trust us. That is what this page is for: it states exactly what a citation here means, so a reader can tell a primary record from a second-hand report at a glance.

How we cite other people’s work

We publish original work only and never republish another outlet (see the Editorial Standards page). Reporting we read while writing is cited, not reproduced:

• Quotations are short, marked as quotations, attributed by name, and linked to the original — never paraphrased into our own voice to disguise the borrowing.
• A story reported first by another outlet says so, and links to them.
• An official statement is labelled as a statement of the party that made it, not as established fact, and links to where that party published it.
• Where a claim exists only in a single unverified report, the story says that too, rather than laundering it into a plain assertion.

How we cite data

Data claims carry more than a source name: they carry a date and a route back to the record.

• Every company and person profile lists the registers and sanctions lists it was built from, with the date each was last read and a link to the original entry.
• Every sanctions listing shows the date its issuing authority last confirmed it. A listing that has been lifted stays visible and is marked lifted, with its date.
• Country indicators carry their year and whether they are actuals or forecasts. A forecast is never printed as if it had already happened.
• Composite scores show their components, so a number can be argued with rather than only believed.
• Where a figure is an approximation, the page says so in the place the figure appears — not only here.

Citing Apolitics

Our articles and our scores may be quoted and linked freely, including commercially, with attribution to "Apolitics" and a link to the page cited. We ask for two things beyond that, both for the reader’s benefit rather than ours:

• Cite the figure with its date. Sanctions data, indicators and scores all change; an undated number attributed to us will eventually be wrong in our name.
• Where you cite data rather than our reporting, cite the primary source alongside us — the register or authority named on the profile. We are a route to that record, not its origin.

Underlying licences

The datasets behind our profiles and scores remain the property of their publishers under their own terms — World Bank (CC BY-4.0), IMF via DBnomics, UN Comtrade, US EIA (public domain), the official sanctions lists of the governments and bodies that issue them, and the national company registers listed on each profile. Citing us does not transfer any right in their data; if you intend to redistribute a dataset rather than cite a figure, take it from the publisher under their licence.

When a citation here is wrong

A missing attribution, a broken link to a source, or a figure that no longer matches the register are all errors we want reported. Tell us through the contact page with the page link and the primary source, and we will correct it — see the Corrections page for how that is handled and what we will not do.