The Notes You Must Not Lose When Reading Public Data

Published material does not become a conclusion the moment you read it. You have to check who wrote it, what period it describes, and what range it covers. Reading only the title and the summary, it is easy to assume the document says things it does not.

Four things to write next to the source

When you save a piece of material, write these alongside it:

• The publishing organization or author
• The date of publication and the reference date the data points to
• The population studied and the range excluded
• A link or page reference so you can find it again

Those four also help later when the material is updated. Two documents with the same title cannot be compared if their reference dates differ. When you copy a number, write down the unit and the denominator too. What you compared against matters more than saying "it went up a lot".

Not finding something and it not existing are different

You cannot conclude that something never happened just because you did not find it in the public material. It may be outside the scope of the document, or recorded under a different name. So the note marks "confirmed" and "could not confirm" separately.

When you cite material, draw a line between the original and your explanation. Separating what the source said, the pattern visible from comparing several sources, and the writer's interpretation lets readers join in the judgment. Writing down the limits of a source alongside the source is a more honest reading than collecting many of them.