Site & law02 of 06
Sources: the public documents this site relies on, and their weight
Every factual statement on this site is traceable to a public document. This page sets out what those documents are and how much weight each kind carries.
The classes of document this site uses
Sources are not interchangeable, and treating them as though they were is how accurate sentences turn into misleading pages. The five classes below are listed in descending order of the weight they carry here.
- Official records. Grant records, official journals, regulations and regulators' decisions. Authoritative for what was agreed, funded, required or decided. Silent on whether any of it worked.
- Public deliverables. Numbered outputs a funded consortium owed its funder. Authoritative for what the consortium reported. A proportion marked public were never actually posted, and this site says so rather than implying a document exists.
- Peer-reviewed literature. Strongest evidence for physical and geometric claims — detection behaviour, propagation, terrain effects. Usually silent on deployment.
- Contemporary reporting. Useful for dates, events and what was said at the time. Weak on technical detail, and the source of most of the compressions this site spends its time undoing.
- Organisations' own material. Consortium dissemination pages, supplier specifications, agencies' own summaries. Used where nothing else exists, always named as self-description.
How the classes are combined
A figure that appears in an official record is quoted as it stands. A figure that appears only in an organisation's own material is attributed to that organisation in the sentence, not in a footnote, so that a reader skimming the page cannot mistake it for an independent finding. A figure produced by this site — the geometric coverage numbers in the diagrams — carries its method in the caption and is marked as calculated rather than measured.
Where two credible sources disagree, both appear and the disagreement is described. That is not indecision. Choosing between them would be an editorial judgement presented as a fact, and a reference that does that quietly is worse than one that admits the conflict.
Where the record stops
The public evidence in this field has a consistent shape, and knowing it is most of what it takes to read the field accurately. What was funded is public. What a consortium reported is partly public. What a member state concluded, and whether anything was bought and deployed, usually is not public at all.
That is why several dossiers on this site end with a demonstration and then a statement that nothing further is recorded. The absence is the finding. Filling it with a plausible inference — that a successful demonstration led to a deployment, or that a silent record means a failure — would be the easiest way to make these pages read better and the fastest way to make them untrue.
Where these documents are held
Naming a document is only half of verifiability, so this is where the classes above are actually published. Grant records, and whichever deliverables a consortium genuinely posted, are on CORDIS, the Commission's research results service: the four programmes with dossiers here are project 218081, 740593, 101021851 and 787021, and each dossier links its own record at the foot of the page. Regulations, official journals and the consolidated texts that supersede them are on EUR-Lex.
Two classes have no single register. Peer-reviewed literature is spread across the scientific databases, and an organisation's own material lives on that organisation's site for as long as it chooses to keep it there — which, as the dissemination section of the NESTOR dossier sets out, is often not long. Where a document named on these pages is no longer publicly held, the page says so instead of linking to a location where it once was.
Per-page sources
The dossiers each carry their own numbered source list at the foot of the page, because a reader examining one programme needs the documents for that programme rather than for the field. The method behind all of it is on the about page; corrections, with the document that shows them, go to contact.
Questions about the sources
Why keep the sources on one page instead of in footnotes?
So the whole basis of the site can be checked in a single pass. Footnotes let a reader verify one sentence; a single list lets them see what kinds of evidence the site rests on overall, and notice what is missing. Page-level sources are still given at the foot of the dossiers, where the reader is examining one programme rather than the field.
Are all the sources free to read?
Most are: grant records, official journals, regulators' decisions and public deliverables are published without charge. A minority of academic papers sit behind paywalls. Where a paywalled paper is the only source for a figure, the page says so, so a reader knows the claim cannot be checked without access.
What counts as a weak source here?
Anything an organisation published about its own work — a consortium's dissemination material, a supplier's specification, an agency's own summary of its performance. These are used, because they are often the only record, but they are always named as what they are rather than presented as independent findings.
What happens when there is no source?
The sentence is not written. Where a reader would reasonably expect the record to continue and it does not — most often at the point where a demonstration ends and a procurement decision would follow — the page states that the record stops rather than filling the gap with an inference.