Which sources come first
First: official and primary
Always preferred, and the authority when sources disagree: the Constitution and bare Acts, Gazette notifications, ministries and departments of the Union and the states, the Press Information Bureau, answers in Parliament, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Census and the National Statistics Office, the Reserve Bank of India, the Economic Survey and Budget documents, state socio-economic surveys and statistical abstracts, scientific agencies such as the Survey of India, the India Meteorological Department and ISRO, commission reports, court judgments, and the examination commissions’ own notifications and question papers.
Second: research
Peer-reviewed papers, universities, research institutes and the reports of multilateral organisations.
Third: reputable reporting, for recent developments
Established newspapers and policy trackers such as PRS Legislative Research — used for what has happened recently, and checked against an official source wherever one exists.
Never an authority
Coaching notes, anonymous blogs, search-optimised summaries, social media, and Wikipedia as a final source. A copy of an official document hosted by someone else is used only when the original cannot be reached, and that is recorded.
How each kind of content is checked
Chapter capsules
Every examinable claim in a chapter is recorded with its source and checked against it. Changing figures carry their reference year and what they are a share of; conflicting sources are resolved by date, then definition, then the most authoritative primary source; dates of Acts distinguish enactment from commencement where they differ. Images are used only where their subject and licence can be confirmed.
Current affairs
An item is selected because it is examinable: it connects to the syllabus, it is likely to be asked about, or it changes a fact a student would otherwise learn wrong. Each topic names its source, and the facts that matter for the examination are checked against an official source where one exists.
Atlas
Places are drawn from published geographic data — official boundaries keyed to government codes, and openly licensed datasets for rivers, coasts and coordinates — rather than traced by hand. Where a place has to sit inside an administrative area, the build checks that it does: the Telangana atlas refuses a district headquarters that falls outside its own district, which is how errors in source data are caught before they reach a student.
Timeline
Each event is researched and dated from sources in the same order of authority as everything else, and checked against them before it is published.
Exam pages and syllabi
Exam facts — the stages, papers, marks, duration and negative marking — and syllabus text are taken from the commission’s own notification and shown with a link to it and the date it was last checked. Official syllabus wording is reproduced exactly; it is never rewritten or summarised. How PrepShark’s chapters cover each line is our own mapping, kept separate from the official text and confirmed by a person before it is shown.
When something is wrong
Sources change and mistakes happen. See corrections for how to report one and what happens next, and our editorial policy for how content is made.