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Reliable Sources

Half of the challenge in research is sourcing. While most people rely on Google, no search engine is ever your friend for conducting effective independent research.

Search engines provide links to sources, but they can not tell which sources are reliable or valuable. Adding artificial intelligence to search rarely helps.

Search engine results require sifting through reams of irrelevant content to find even a little valuable information.

I use these sources regularly to stay informed about world events, especially in economics. All of these are free to use, or have free tiers of access.

Everyone should check their own facts and do their own research. Never take anything I write at face value. If you question the data, please do check it yourself, because I can and do make mistakes now and again. Independent verification holds me accountable and makes sure I cite my sources properly.

Economic Sources

  • Federal Reserve Economic Data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
    The FRED System is an open access data warehouse of data from a vast array of government and financial sources, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Census, ADP, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Technically it is a secondary rather than a primary source. As a data warehouse it provides information without narrative or spin.

  • Congressional Budget Office: https://www.cbo.gov/data/budget-economic-data

    The Congressional Budget Office reviews Congressional appropriations bills and assesses probable impacts. They have accumulated a repository of economic projection data as a result.

  • OECD Data Explorer: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/
    The OECD Data Explorer data warehouse from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development provides direct access to OECD data sets. OECD information not replicated into FRED can often be found here.

  • International Monetary Fund Data Portal: https://data.imf.org/

    The IMF Data Portal is another source of global economic data, with a particular emphasis on currency and money flows.

  • Cleveland Fed InflationNow: https://www.clevelandfed.org/indicators-and-data/inflation-nowcasting
    The Cleveland Federal Reserve maintains a Nowcast projecting current trends in consumer price inflation given prevailing economic conditions. It is updated daily. The Nowcast is an interesting primary source of what is happening in quasi-realtime with consumer price inflation in the United States.

  • Trading Economics: https://tradingeconomics.com/
    Trading Economics is an investment data service which provides a wealth of free and open access investment and financial data, including market prices for securities and commodities, as well as economic indicators from around the world. While it is not a primary source (it pulls in data from other sources), it is a reliable secondary source that presents just the data.

  • BarChart: https://www.barchart.com
    BarChart is a financial markets tracking and analysis tool which provides a free tier with near realtime access to a variety of financial data, including stock prices, commodities prices, and a number of stock market indices for a number of finanancial markets worldwide.

  • Google Finance: https://finance.google.com

  • Yahoo! Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com

Legal Sources

  • U.S. Supreme Court Center: https://supreme.justia.com

    All US Supreme Court opinions can be found here, including all dissents and concurrences

  • Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives - United States Code: https://uscode.house.gov/browse.xhtml

    The OLRC maintains the complete United States Code with currency information. All federal statutes may be found here.

  • Legal Information Institute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/

    The Legal Information Institute is maintained by Cornell University. In addition to maintaining the complete US Code, a number of legal definitions and commentaries are available here.

  • eCFR— The Code of Federal Regulation: https://www.ecfr.gov/

    Federal Regulations are the rules proposed and enforced by the various government agencies. While not actual laws passed by Congress, the CFR is often categorized as “administrative law” as it details how government agencies intend to carry out their various duties and functions pursuant to federal law.

  • National Constitution Center: https://constitutioncenter.org

    The National Constitution Center is a private, non-profit entity which provides online access to the text of the United States Constitution, all the Amendments thereto, as well as a number of essays and discussions about the what the Constitution says.

  • The Avalon Project: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/default.asp

    The Avalon Project contains historic documents covering all aspects of human thought. Among their most notable works are The Federalist Papers, The English Bill of Rights, and The Mayflower Compact.

Political Sources

Corporate Media Sources (Wire Services And Aggregators)

Alternative Media Sources (Wire Services And Aggregators)

  • Citizen Free Press: https://citizenfreepress.com/
    Citizen Free Press aims to be what the Drudge Report used to be, even to aping the minimalist web page design. As with the original Drudge Report, its headlines are frequently conservative/libertarian/right-leaning, and so are its sources.

Social Media (Besides Substack)

  • X: https://x.com
    While X has a somewhat chaotic political tilt since Musk bought the platform, it still manages to serve as a reasonably useful near-realtime news feed, with a number of corporate media sources still posting updates.

  • BlueSky: https://bsky.app/
    BlueSky is a straight X/Twitter clone, and aspires to be “What X used to be”—which means the social media comments are left-leaning insipid. However, media outlets are doing their best to promote BlueSky as the new X/Twitter alternative for their realtime news postings, and so it has more or less the same utility as X as a realtime newsfeed.

Academic/Research Sources

  • PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

    Supported by the National Institutes Of Health, PubMed is an online database of medical peer-reviewed research papers. Not all of them are freely available, depending on the terms of the journal in which the papers appeared.

  • PrePubMed: http://www.prepubmed.org/

    This is a free search service indexing a number of preprint servers, providing access to research which has not (yet) been peer reviewed.

  • Our World In Data: https://ourworldindata.org/
    The mission of Our World In Data is “to publish the research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.” It serves as an open source data warehouse for a variety of data metrics.

  • Worldometer: https://www.worldometers.info
    Worldometer is another open source statistics site. It is an established and independent aggregator of statistical data.

Important Works

Style Sources

Finding information is important—presenting that information and sourcing it is also essential for reliable communication.

For most media sources, my practice within All Facts Matter is to archive a news media source and then link to that archive directly in the body of the article. However, for scholarly work, judicial opinions, or other more or less “fixed” reference materials, I will also cite the source in a footnote at the bottom of the article, broadly adhering to the citation formats of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

© 2025 Peter Nayland Kust
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