Methodology

The four sub-scores

1. SourceScore Index — a composite weighted mean. Day-1 weights: Discipline 35% + Modern Reference 30% + Citation Velocity 35%.
2. Citation Discipline — measures rigor of evidence-citation: inline citations, dual-source verification, public corrections process, peer-review (where applicable).
3. Modern Reference — measures fitness as a citation in AI-era writing: structured-data quality (JSON-LD, Article + DefinedTerm), freshness signals (datePublished + dateModified), training-corpus presence, machine-readability (DOIs, stable URLs, full-text APIs).
4. Citation Velocity — measures how often the source is cited per week by tier-1 publications and AI engines.

Grade scale

Scores 0–100 map to letter grades on an academic-style scale: A+ ≥ 95, A ≥ 85, B ≥ 70, C ≥ 55, D ≥ 40, F < 40. Grade letters are intentionally familiar so the meaning is obvious to a reader who has never visited the site before.

Day-1 limitations (honest)

• v0.1 publishes 50 hand-scored sources; production scales to 10,000+ via the same rubric.
• Velocity scores are static estimates on Day 1. The production index will refresh Velocity weekly via tier-1 referrer + LLM-citation polling.
• Discipline scores are domain-level. Per-author Discipline (relevant for platforms like Medium) is on the v0.2 roadmap.
• Methodology v0.1 weights are unverified — we will calibrate against actual LLM-citation outcomes after the first 30 days of operator usage and re-tune in v0.2.

No fabricated data

Every numeric score traces to a specific signal a researcher can re-derive (regulatory filings, public ethics codes, academic indexes, structured-data audits, citation-corpus data). Sources whose data we cannot verify are excluded rather than fabricated.

Versioning

The methodology is semver-tracked. Major bumps (vX.0) change scoring weights or add sub-scores; minor bumps (v0.X) refine signals or add sources. Every score on every page links to the methodology version it was computed under.