Source policy
Sourcing standards for GCI Media, including how GCI's own data may and may not be cited.
Every claim carries a source
Factual claims are cited to a named publisher with a working link and the date we accessed it. Every article that makes factual claims ends with a Sources and references section. We prefer primary sources — a statistics office, a regulator, an operator, a peer-reviewed paper — over secondary reporting of them.
Citing Global City Intelligence data
This matters more than any other rule here, because we publish the platform we cite.
The main platform distinguishes between data that is measured, data that is an official estimate, and data that is modelled — generated from country-level baselines and structural signals rather than observed for that specific city. A large share of the platform's indicator layer is currently modelled.
When an article uses a platform figure, it states which of those it is. A modelled figure is never presented as a measurement, and never given the false precision of a measured one. Where an article's argument depends on a number being real, we source that number independently rather than relying on a modelled value. The platform's own methodology page describes how its scores are constructed.
Data stories
A data story states its method: what the dataset is, what was included and excluded, how anything was normalised, and what the result does not show. If a finding is sensitive to a modelling choice, we say so rather than presenting a single number.
Anonymous sources
We avoid them. Where a source cannot be named, we explain why, and we do not build a factual claim on an unnamed source alone.