How Dataminal traces every figure to its source
Every number on Dataminal carries its publisher, its release and its date. Here is how, and why it matters when a figure is revised, restated or disputed.
Key findings
- Every series names the institution that published it and the release each figure came from.
- Revised figures are kept beside the originals, so a number can be read as it was first published or as it stands today.
- Figures are read from the publisher's own files and checked against the publisher's own totals.
- In Research Intelligence, every figure in an answer comes from the data and every quotation from a retrieved document.
Nigerian data is published by many institutions, on different schedules and in different formats, and it changes after publication. A monthly report is corrected; a price index is rebased; a table moves from one page of a bulletin to another. When a figure is quoted without its origin, none of that history survives, and nobody can tell whether two numbers disagree because something changed or because they come from different versions of the same release.
Dataminal is built on the opposite principle: a number never travels without its source. The rule runs through the datasets, the API and Research Intelligence.
Every figure names its publisher and its release
Each dataset records the institution that published it, such as the National Bureau of Statistics, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Debt Management Office or the National Pension Commission, together with the release each figure came from and the date it was published. The same information appears on the dataset page and is returned with every response from the Dataminal API, so a figure copied into a spreadsheet or a report keeps its origin.
Revisions are kept, not overwritten
Institutions correct their figures, and the corrections matter. Dataminal keeps each published version instead of replacing the old figure with the new one. The balance of payments data holds every quarterly figure as each edition of the Central Bank's Quarterly Statistical Bulletin printed it, with more than 21,000 later restatements kept beside the figures they revise. Pension fund assets keep every upload of PenCom's monthly report, dated by when it was published. A figure can be read as it stands today, or as it stood when a decision was made.
Read from the source, checked against the source
Figures are read directly from the publisher's own files, whether a spreadsheet, a statistical bulletin or a PDF report, rather than retyped. They are then checked against the publisher's own arithmetic: components against totals, months against quarters, identities that should hold. Where a source contradicts itself, the figure is flagged and the defect recorded. It is never quietly corrected.
Research Intelligence answers from the record
Research Intelligence applies the same rule to answers. It works out which series, tables and documents a question needs, and reads them. Every figure in an answer comes from that data, and calculations such as growth rates, real terms and rankings are computed from the underlying records rather than recalled by a model.
Each figure is tied to its dataset and release, and each quotation to the document it came from, with passages labelled so a reader can open the exact text. Web results, when used, come from a fixed list of sources and serve as context only.
What this means for you
- Quote a Dataminal figure with its agency and release, and anyone can check it.
- When a number changes, look for the revision before assuming an error.
- If something looks wrong, tell us the dataset and the period at info@dataminal.com, and we will check it against the source.