Citing a figure

A number without a source, a table reference and a year is not a statistic — it is a claim.

Three components, none optional

Every disability figure that appears in a report, a briefing or a press release was extracted from somewhere: a published bulletin, an official dataset, a survey release. The source is the first piece of information a reader needs to assess the number — not because attribution is a courtesy, but because it tells you which instrument produced the count, and therefore what the count actually measures. The Family Resources Survey figure for disability prevalence and the Annual Population Survey figure for the disability employment gap are both "official statistics"; they are not the same kind of thing, and conflating them produces confusion that no amount of careful prose can fix.

The table reference matters for a second reason. Statistical bulletins are not monoliths. They carry multiple breakdowns — by age, sex, region, impairment type — and those breakdowns can diverge sharply. A headline figure drawn from the summary page may sit some distance from the figure in Table 3.4, which applies a different base population or a different weighting scheme. Anyone who cannot name the table cannot reproduce the number, and a number that cannot be reproduced cannot be checked.

The year — meaning the reference period, not the publication date — closes the loop. A statistic published in spring 2024 may describe conditions measured across 2022–23; a figure from a census describes a single reference date a decade earlier. When two figures from different years appear side by side as though they are comparable, comparability over time becomes the first question to ask, before any inference about change is drawn.

The full citation, then, runs: name of the producing body; title of the release or dataset; table or chart identifier; the reference period the data covers. Where a bulletin has been revised since first publication, the revision date belongs in the record too. This is not housekeeping — it is the minimum structure that allows a figure to be interrogated, updated or corrected. Without it, a number circulates without a tether, and the error it may contain circulates with it.