Sources & Attribution Policy

Every material claim in an Orbis Signal briefing is traceable to a publicly accessible source URL collected during live web research. We do not publish unattributed assertions, anonymous sourcing without epistemic qualification, or references to sources that were not retrieved and recorded during production.

Source attribution is not decorative. It is the foundation of our verification model. URLs displayed in a published briefing are a subset of URLs locked in the topic's evidence record — enforced by automated validation before publication.

Sources are gathered through web-grounded research at the beginning of each production cycle. Research stages use live search to retrieve current reporting, official releases, and institutional publications relevant to selected investigation threads.

For each topic — politics, finance, and technology — we maintain a list of preferred outlets that research prompts prioritise. These include established newswires, financial press, and policy institutions appropriate to the domain. Preferred outlets guide discovery; they do not exclude other qualifying sources.

Each source is recorded with:

• A secure HTTPS URL
• Publisher name and article title
• A tier classification (see below)
• A unique identifier linking it to specific claims

All sources are classified into three tiers based on proximity to primary information:

• Tier 1 — Primary: newswires, official government and central bank releases, primary documents, named institutional data, company earnings calls, and major wire-service reporting (e.g. Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, FT, WSJ)
• Tier 2 — Analytic: established policy and financial analysis from identified authors and research institutions (e.g. The Economist, CFR, IISS, BIS, major think-tank reports, rated bank research)
• Tier 3 — Commentary: opinion pieces, blogs, aggregators, and reporting that relies on unnamed sources

Tier rules enforced in production:

• At least one tier-1 source is required for any claim labelled confirmed
• Tier-3 sources alone cannot support confirmed or inference-level judgments
• When only tier-3 sourcing is available, the claim must be labelled speculation
• Source lists are lean — typically 5–10 high-quality sources, not exhaustive lists of marginal references

Each published briefing includes a Sources section listing the outlets referenced, ordered with lead-story sources first. Each entry displays the publisher, title, tier classification, and link to the original material.

Event articles embedded in briefings carry their own source URL lists, also validated against the evidence record. Inline references within analytical sections do not replace the consolidated sources section — both serve different reader needs.

The following source practices are prohibited and blocked by our quality controls:

• Invented or hallucinated URLs not present in the evidence record
• Presenting tier-3 commentary as equivalent to tier-1 primary reporting
• Confirmed claims without a traceable tier-1 source in the evidence record
• Aggregating sources without distinguishing tier quality in the published list

We link to original sources as they were retrieved at production time. URLs may subsequently change, paywalls may restrict access, or original articles may be removed by publishers. We cannot guarantee perpetual accessibility of third-party links.

We do not republish full third-party content. Briefings synthesise and analyse; readers should consult linked sources for original reporting and full context.

Related: Fact-Checking & Verification, Editorial Policy.