Official-source first

Sourcing policy

The newsroom treats sources as evidence, not raw material to be republished.

Primary evidence

Highest-priority sources include government departments, ministries, official scholarship programs, university websites and newsrooms, admissions offices, national research agencies and official higher-education portals. When a secondary report discovers a story, Scholar should trace the material claim back to the original announcement whenever possible.

Secondary sources

Established education and news publishers may be used as discovery signals or supporting context. They are never a license to copy or rewrite complete copyrighted articles. Secondary-source discoveries require editorial review and should not be configured for automatic publication.

Crawling boundaries

The crawler prefers RSS/Atom or public structured feeds where available, then permitted HTML pages. It respects robots.txt, does not bypass authentication or anti-bot controls, uses conservative fetch intervals, validates content types and limits response size. A failed or blocked source is logged; the system does not circumvent the restriction.

Source labels

“Official-source verified” means Scholar traced the relevant information to the identified institution, provider or government source. It does not mean that organization endorses Noustiq Scholar, partners with it or guarantees the opportunity.

Evidence uncertainty

If current-cycle eligibility, funding, deadline or application conditions cannot be supported, the correct state is “not verified” or editorial review—not a guessed value.