How to choose sources for your monitoring
Criteria and steps for selecting monitoring sources: relevance, reliability, frequency, coverage, access method and terms of use.
The quality of a monitoring system rarely exceeds that of its sources. With poorly chosen sources, not even the best filter or the best summary can make up for it: there is too much noise, or the facts that mattered are missing. Choosing sources is also a task that never ends; sources change, disappear and new ones emerge.
Start with the questions
Before opening a search engine, write down what you need to know. “Changes in food labeling requirements in three countries” leads to very different sources than “news from the food sector”. The more specific the question, the easier it is to decide whether a source deserves a place on the list.
For each question, also note what kind of fact would answer it: a published regulation, a scientific article, a contract award, a corporate announcement. That kind of fact points to the family of sources you should look for.
Primary and secondary
- Primary sources: publish the original fact. An official gazette, a regulator’s website, a patent database, a public procurement portal, the organization’s own press release.
- Secondary sources: report on, summarize or comment on what others published. News media, specialized blogs, industry newsletters.
Primary sources provide accuracy and let you cite the original document, but they tend to be dry and do not explain the context. Secondary sources provide interpretation and save time, at the cost of a greater risk of error or omission. A balanced list combines both: the secondary source alerts and gives context, the primary source confirms.
Seven evaluation criteria
| Criterion | Question to ask yourself |
|---|---|
| Relevance | What share of what it publishes answers my questions? |
| Authority | Who is behind it, and what responsibility do they take for what they publish? |
| Accuracy | Does it cite its sources, correct errors, distinguish fact from opinion? |
| Timeliness and frequency | How regularly does it publish, and how long after the fact? |
| Coverage | Which countries, languages and subtopics does it cover, and which does it leave out? |
| Access method | Does it offer a stable channel for capturing it without manual intervention? |
| Terms of use | Do its terms allow the use you want to make of it? |
No source scores highest on everything. An official gazette is strong on authority and weak on context; an expert blog can be valuable for analysis and irregular in frequency. What matters is knowing what role each one plays.
A simple reliability rating
It is useful to assign each source a level, for example:
- A: primary or official source, or an outlet with a proven track record. What it publishes can be cited directly.
- B: generally reliable source, worth cross-checking when the claim is important.
- C: source useful as an indication, which should never support a conclusion on its own.
The level is not a final judgment. It helps decide how much verification a piece of information requires before it reaches a report, and it should be reviewed with use.
Access and terms
An excellent source that can only be read by visiting it manually every day ends up abandoned. Check how you can capture it regularly: a syndication feed, a sitemap, an email newsletter, an application programming interface or a records export. The article RSS, RIS and beyond reviews those methods.
Also review the site’s rules. The robots.txt file and the terms of use indicate what the publisher allows. Respecting them is not only a legal matter: monitoring that depends on unauthorized access is fragile and can be cut off without notice. If a source prohibits automated capture, look for an official channel or discard it.
Steps to build the list
- Take inventory. Gather what your team already reads: subscriptions, bookmarks, newsletters, licensed databases.
- Fill the gaps. For each question without a primary source, find one: the regulating agency, the registry that publishes, the leading journal.
- Evaluate against the seven criteria and assign a reliability level.
- Test for a few weeks. Observe how much of what is captured is actually useful and how much is repeated across sources.
- Prune. Remove those that only add noise or duplicate better ones.
- Document. Record why each source is there, what it covers, in which language and who proposed it.
- Review periodically. Set a date to go over the entire list.
Common mistakes
- Confusing quantity with coverage. Many outlets reproducing the same wire story amount to a single source.
- Relying only on secondary sources. Without the original document you cannot verify or cite accurately.
- Ignoring language and geography. If you monitor a country, you need its local sources, in its language, not just the international press.
- Forgetting your own sources. Internal reports, visit notes and meeting minutes contain information that no external source has.
- Never removing anything. A list that only grows ends up unmanageable.
- Adding sources without recording why. Months later, no one remembers why they are there or whether they are still useful.
A living list
Treat your list of sources as an asset to be maintained, not a task to be completed once. A short, documented and reviewed list produces better monitoring than a long, neglected one. You can see how the main types of source are grouped on the sources page.