What counts as a source
A record may be built only from a page its provider controls: the university, the funder, the government department or the intergovernmental body running the award. That includes their application portals and their official inventories. It excludes aggregators, forums, news coverage and anything that reports the award second-hand.
Aggregated content may still help us find an award. It can never establish a deadline, a funding package, an eligibility rule or an application route — those come from the provider or they are recorded as unconfirmed.
What a source must clear before it is read
- Robots policy. A source is checked against the site’s own crawling rules first. One that disallows us is not read.
- Terms review. A source whose terms forbid automated access stays unread, whatever its robots file says.
- Health and change detection. Sources are re-checked on a governed schedule, and a source that starts failing is taken out of rotation rather than left to publish stale facts.
Automatic publication is the exception
Of 9,097 sources, 1,086 are eligible to publish without a person. The rest cannot: anything extracted from them requires a person to check it before publication. Eligibility is a property of the source, not of the record, and it is withdrawn when a source’s reliability changes.
What is deliberately not counted as a scholarship
Research jobs and institutional grants are employment and funding of a different kind. They are published separately and are never counted toward scholarship figures unless the provider itself describes the award as a scholarship or funded study.