Editorial & Corrections Policy

How pages are produced

Every product, category, and ranking page on PlainSafety is generated from documented public datasets: the CPSC National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), SaferProducts.gov consumer incident reports, and CPSC recall announcements. We load each dataset into a structured database and render every page from that database. The figures you see — danger scores, annual ER estimates, demographic breakdowns, multi-year trends — are computed from CPSC's numbers, not hand-typed and not estimated by us.

This is a data-publishing model: one reviewed template renders every category page so that coverage is consistent across all 838 categories. We are transparent that these pages are produced programmatically through a continuous editorial pipeline from the source data, rather than written one at a time. The editorial work goes into the pipeline — how data is sourced, scored, and computed — into the methodology, and into the written guides, not into hand-authoring hundreds of near-identical category pages, which would add no accuracy and invite inconsistency.

Sourcing standards

• Primary sources only. Injury figures come from the CPSC NEISS national estimates; incident detail comes from SaferProducts.gov; recall facts come from CPSC recall notices. We do not republish third-party summaries.
• Attribution in context. Each data page names its dataset and the 2005–2024 NEISS window near the figures, and links to the methodology that explains how NEISS estimates national injury counts.
• Derived values are labeled. Numbers we compute ourselves — the danger score, percentile rankings, and five-year trend — are presented as our analysis of CPSC data, distinct from CPSC's published counts.
• No invented data. Where a value is unavailable for a category, the page says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

Update cadence

The CPSC releases NEISS injury files annually. We refresh our database when a new yearly file is published and recompute danger scores and trends. Between releases the figures are stable because the source itself does not change. The most recent data year reflected on the site is 2024; the data window shown on every page tells you which releases a page is based on.

Corrections process

If a figure on PlainSafety looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from the CPSC datasets, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the source data or our processing of it — so this is how we handle a report:

1. Report. Use the contact page with the page URL and the number that looks off.
2. Verify. We compare the figure against the CPSC's published NEISS data for that category and year.
3. Fix at the source. If the value is wrong on our side, we correct it in the database and pipeline that generate the page — not just on the single page — so every affected page is fixed at once. If the figure faithfully reflects CPSC's published data, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
4. Note it. Material corrections are reflected the next time the affected pages rebuild, with the data window shown so you can see which release a page is based on.

We aim to acknowledge data-error reports within a few business days.

Independence & affiliation

PlainSafety is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. We present CPSC's public-domain data in a more searchable form and link back to the official sources throughout.