ScholarBrief

Editorial Policy

How we decide what to publish, what we refuse to publish, and how independence is protected.

This policy is the standard our editorial desks work to. It is written to be specific enough to be broken — a policy that could never be violated is not a policy, it is marketing. If you think a page on this site departs from what follows, that is a reportable problem and we want to hear about it.

1. Purpose

ScholarBrief exists to help students act correctly on education funding and application decisions. Every editorial judgement resolves back to a single test: does this help a specific reader do the right thing at the right time? Content that is engaging but not actionable, or that is optimised for search traffic rather than for the reader in front of it, fails that test.

2. Sourcing

Source hierarchy

  1. Primary official sources. The body that actually administers the thing being described: the scholarship commission, government department, funding council, examination board, or the university itself. Their current published guidance is authoritative.
  2. Official secondary material. Regulator publications, national statistics agencies, published institutional data.
  3. Named expert sources. Admissions officers, financial aid administrators, disability advisers, academic librarians and programme staff, quoted with attribution and consent.

Below that line we do not go. We do not source from other education websites, scholarship aggregators, forums, social media, AI-generated summaries, or our own earlier articles. Recycling secondary sources is how a wrong figure propagates across the entire internet and stays there for years.

Reading the source in full

Writers work from the source document itself, in its current published version — not a summary of it, not a cached copy, not a screenshot. Where guidance is long, that is unfortunate; it is also where the disqualifying clauses live.

Linking

We link directly to official sources, with no redirect service, no tracking wrapper and no affiliate parameter. External links open in a new tab and are marked. Every outbound link is tested before publication and re-tested when a page is re-verified.

3. What we deliberately do not publish

These exclusions are the core of the policy and they are not negotiable for commercial reasons.

Changeable figures

Award amounts, stipend values, closing dates, eligibility thresholds, income cut-offs, fee levels and financial aid formulas are not republished on this site as standalone facts. They change every cycle. A third-party copy of them goes stale without any visible signal to a reader, and a student acting on a stale figure loses a cycle or is disqualified. We describe what kind of support a programme gives and what the application requires, then link to the page that holds the current numbers.

Acceptance rates and admissions statistics

Published inconsistently, defined differently between institutions and countries, and routinely misquoted after being detached from their methodology. They also encourage exactly the wrong behaviour in applicants. Where selectivity genuinely matters we say so qualitatively and point to the institution’s own published data.

Testimonials, success stories and reviews

We have no verified pipeline of real students whose outcomes we can confirm, so we publish none at all — no case studies, no “how I won a full ride” features, no star ratings, no user reviews of providers or agents. An invented testimonial is a fabrication however inspiring it reads.

Guarantees and probability claims

No page on this site will ever tell you a scholarship is guaranteed, that a strategy will get you funded, or that your chances are a particular number. Nobody can know those things, and the phrase “guaranteed scholarship” is itself one of the most reliable markers of a fraudulent operation.

Copied descriptive text

We do not paste institutional or provider prose into our pages. We read official material and write our own explanation of it. Direct quotation is used sparingly, kept short, marked as a quote and attributed to the source.

Automatically generated pages

Every page here is written and edited by a person. We do not template thousands of thin listings from a database to catch long-tail search traffic, and we do not publish pages whose only purpose is to rank for a phrase and funnel readers elsewhere.

4. Verification

Every page is checked by a second person before publication. That check tests each factual claim against its cited source, follows every outbound link, and confirms that nothing in the piece asserts a figure from the exclusion list above.

Pages whose accuracy depends on rules that change — scholarship profiles, visa explainers, aid system guides — carry a Last verified date. That date records when someone last opened the governing official source and compared it to our text. It is not the publication date and it is not updated by editing a typo. If we cannot re-verify a page, we say so on the page or we retire it. A stale scholarship page is worse than no page.

5. Commercial independence

  • Advertising is inventory, never coverage. No advertiser can commission, review, alter, delay or suppress an editorial page, and none sees unpublished work.
  • No pay-for-placement. No scholarship provider, university, education agent, course platform or recruiter has ever paid to appear on this site, to appear in a particular position, or to receive a link.
  • No affiliate links in editorial. Our comparisons carry no commission, on courses, tools, insurance, currency transfer, accommodation or anything else.
  • Advertising is labelled and separated from editorial content and is never styled to resemble an article, a recommendation or a scholarship listing.
  • If we ever publish sponsored content, it will be labelled at the top of the page, before the content, in the same size type as the body text, and excluded from editorial recommendation modules.
  • Writers declare interests. Anyone with a financial or personal interest in an organisation covered by a page does not write or edit that page.

6. Use of AI tools

We take a defined position because readers are entitled to know. Generative AI may be used internally for mechanical support: summarising our own notes, checking structure, suggesting headings, spotting inconsistencies in a draft.

It is not used to establish facts, to source information, to draft published prose, or to generate scholarship profiles. Language models produce plausible award amounts, deadlines and application URLs that do not exist, which is a catastrophic failure mode for this subject specifically. Every factual claim on this site traces to a human-read primary source, and no page is published on the strength of a model’s output.

7. Independence from institutions

ScholarBrief is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any university, government department, examination board or scholarship provider named on this site. We use their names descriptively, to identify what we are writing about. We accept no funding, hospitality, sponsored trips or gifts from organisations we cover.

8. Right of reply

Any organisation described on this site may request a correction or a right of reply through the contact page, marked PROVIDER. We acknowledge within three working days. Where a factual error is demonstrated against the organisation’s own published material we correct it and log the change. Where the disagreement is about characterisation rather than fact, we will publish a concise response from the organisation on the page. We do not remove accurate, fairly presented information on request.

9. Corrections

Handled under a separate published policy: see corrections policy. In summary, we correct errors promptly, note material changes on the affected page, and never delete a page to make a mistake disappear.

10. Accessibility and plain language

We target WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Pages use semantic structure, meaningful heading hierarchy, sufficient colour contrast in both light and dark themes, visible focus indicators, keyboard operability and text alternatives. We write in plain English, expand jargon on first use, and prefer short sentences — a large share of our readers are reading in a second or third language, and clarity is an accessibility requirement, not a stylistic preference.

11. Reader privacy as an editorial value

We do not require registration, we do not gate content behind an email address, and we do not run “scholarship matching” forms that harvest personal data. Search runs in your browser. See the privacy policy.

12. Reviewing this policy

This policy is reviewed at least annually and whenever we change something material about how the site operates — enabling advertising, adding analytics, accepting a named contributor or introducing any sponsored format. Changes are dated.

Change log: 11 September 2026 — first published.