The single fastest way to lose a room is a number nobody can trace. "The market is $9 billion" invites exactly one question — according to whom? — and if the answer is a chatbot or a broker's press release, the whole analysis is done. Every defensible figure comes from a public source you can name, open, and date. Here's the hierarchy, ranked by how much trust a figure inherits from its source.
Sources are graded 1–5. Higher-trust sources are primary issuers of fact; lower ones need corroboration before they anchor a headline number.
| Source class | Trust | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Official statistics Census/BLS, Eurostat, OECD, KOSIS, UN Comtrade, trade associations | 5 | Unit counts (facilities, firms, vehicles), spend baselines, penetration rates |
| Regulatory filings SEC/EDGAR 10-K/S-1, Korea DART, central-bank data | 5 | Revenue, segment sizes, pricing signals, competitor scale of listed players |
| Standards & regulators ISO/IEC, IEEE, SAE, 3GPP, NHTSA, FDA, EU regulations, MOTIE | 4 | Adoption mandates, technical inflection points, regulatory tailwinds/restraints |
| Freely published research NVCA public releases, a16z/Bessemer notes, government white papers | 3 | Framing, growth narratives, directional CAGR — corroborate, never cite alone for a headline |
| Company disclosures Public pricing pages, investor decks, earnings-call transcripts | 3 | Price-per-unit assumptions, funding, product capabilities |
| Named-byline press Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, TechCrunch (named reporter + date) | 2 | Deal facts, timeline events — corroborate against a primary source where possible |
What's deliberately absent: paid, licensed research (the big syndicated-report firms). It's copyrighted, its methodology is opaque, and reproducing its numbers isn't defensible — so it's never cited or reproduced. Everything above is public and license-free.
A report's sourcing isn't just pass/fail — the mix of source tiers rolls up into a single evidence score, so a report leaning on trust-2 press reads differently from one built on trust-5 filings.
Discipline only counts if it's enforced. Every report has a fixed set of required citation slots — the parent market, the unit count, the unit price, the value pool, the CAGR, and a regulatory driver per region. Each must carry a real public source, or the report cannot pass QC.
An open slot is surfaced to the analyst, not silently dropped. A claim without a public source doesn't ship — that's the product's spine, and it's the difference between a report and an opinion.
Commissioned reports ship with a sourcing appendix: every required figure, its public source, and the evidence score.
See the sourcing ledger → Commission a cited report