ExplainerPublished
Excess Mortality: What It Measures and Why It Matters
How excess mortality is defined and estimated, what it revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and major heatwaves, and how to read the figures without being misled.
Insight
What Makes Research Citable — by People and by Machines
Stable references, explicit dates, open licences and plain summaries determine whether research gets cited accurately, by readers and increasingly by AI systems.
Insight
Five Questions to Ask Before Trusting a Statistic
A short checklist — source, definition, denominator, uncertainty, comparison — that catches most misleading numbers before they spread.
Primer
Randomised Controlled Trials in Public Policy: A Primer
Why randomisation is the cleanest route to causal claims, the landmark policy trials that proved the method’s worth, and the questions RCTs cannot answer.
Insight
Why Definitions Decide Debates in Public Statistics
Unemployment, poverty, migration: in each case, the definitional choice — not the data collection — often determines the headline.
Latest research
View all
Evidence & Research Methods
View allPrimer
Randomised Controlled Trials in Public Policy: A Primer
Why randomisation is the cleanest route to causal claims, the landmark policy trials that proved the method’s worth, and the questions RCTs cannot answer.
Data & Statistical Integrity
View allInsight
What Makes Research Citable — by People and by Machines
Stable references, explicit dates, open licences and plain summaries determine whether research gets cited accurately, by readers and increasingly by AI systems.
Behind the research
Methodology & standards
How every document is sourced, reviewed, revised and corrected — including what we do not publish.
Read more
About the Institute
Who we are, the principles we work by, and how independence and funding are handled.
Read more
Citing & reusing our work
Everything is licensed CC BY 4.0: republish, translate and cite with attribution.
Read more