Sources and Methodology
Which sources we treat as authoritative, how a claim is checked before it publishes, and what we do not claim to have done.
This page describes how the material here is produced, so that a reader can judge how much weight to put on any given claim.
Source hierarchy
In descending order of preference:
- Manufacturer documentation — datasheets, application notes and technology descriptions published by the company that makes the part.
- Standards and metrology bodies — IEEE, IEC, NIST and equivalent national institutes, for definitions, units and measurement methods.
- Peer-reviewed and institutional publications — journal papers, conference proceedings, and technical reports from research organisations.
- Patents, for mechanism and prior art, read as claims rather than as measurements.
- Reputable secondary technical press, for context and for locating primary material, not as the support for a numeric claim.
What a claim needs
Different claims need different evidence, and treating them alike is how errors get through.
- A specification figure must come with its measurement conditions. A phase noise number without an offset and a carrier, or a tuning range without a temperature, is not a usable claim and we do not publish it as one.
- A vendor-specific number is attributed to that vendor’s own document, and is not generalised to the component class.
- A general engineering relationship — that multiplying a carrier by N degrades phase noise by 20·log₁₀(N), for instance — is standard material and is stated without a citation attached to every instance.
- An inference of ours is written as ours. Where we say a trade-off usually resolves one way, that is editorial judgement, and the surrounding text says so.
What we do not claim
We do not test parts. Nothing here is presented as first-hand measurement, and no article implies bench work we have not done. Where an article’s method is anything other than ordinary human writing, its content-method label and disclosure say so on the page.
We do not sell, distribute or represent any component discussed here, and no manufacturer reviews or approves our articles.
Scanned and unreadable sources
Some of the best primary material in this field is published as scanned PDFs whose text cannot be extracted. Where we have opened such a document and confirmed what it is but could not read a specific figure from it, we cite it as background and do not attach a numeric claim to it.
Corrections
If a claim here is wrong, or a source does not support the sentence next to it, tell us. Send the page URL, the specific sentence, and a source we can check, to the editorial address in the footer. The process is described in the fact-checking and corrections policy.