Source policy
Where our facts come from, in what order we prefer them, and what we will not cite.
What counts as a source
A claim in a SocialSportHub Journal story is sourced to primary material wherever primary material exists: the governing body that writes the rule, the standards organisation that specifies the surface, the public institution that holds the record, the researchers who ran the study. Each reference is labelled with what kind of authority it is, so a reader can weigh it without following every link.
The order we prefer
- Governing bodies and standards organisations — for rules, dimensions, specifications and certification procedures.
- Government and public institutions — for participation data, public health context and archives.
- Peer-reviewed research — for mechanisms, physiology and biomechanics.
- Universities and museums — for history and technical explanation.
- Public datasets — where the underlying data is downloadable and checkable.
A citation supports a claim
References are attached to specific sentences, not appended in bulk at the end. If a source is listed, something in the story rests on it; our own build fails if a listed source is never cited in the text. Source dumping makes a story look researched without making it checkable, which is the opposite of the point.
Links we will not use
We do not cite generated download links that expire — several governing bodies serve documents through single-use URLs that return a 404 within minutes — and our build rejects them automatically. We cite the stable page that hosts the document and name the document in the reference. We also re-check every cited URL as part of our own quality gates; a reference that has gone dead is a defect, not a footnote.
What we do not do
We do not cite other outlets' reporting as though it were primary evidence, we do not cite encyclopedias for specific figures, and we do not use a citation to lend authority to a claim the source does not actually make.