Publication delay

Publication delay is the time between a defined milestone in a record's history and its public release. The milestone might be the event, receipt of a report, or approval for publication. A meaningful delay measure names both endpoints; otherwise, different stages can be mistaken for the same interval.

A record can pass through several stages

An event can occur before it is reported, and a report can be reviewed before it appears in a public dataset. Seattle's crime-data documentation, for example, says reports awaiting approval are not released until a subsequent update. That describes one agency's publication process, not a universal schedule. Seattle dataset documentation.

Some publications also use a deliberate reporting period, such as a monthly summary released after the month ends. The interval should be interpreted against that stated process rather than assumed to reflect an operational failure.

Example

Hypothetical: An incident occurs on June 1, is reported on June 3, is approved on June 5, and appears publicly on June 6.

The event-to-publication interval is five calendar days. The report-to-publication interval is three days. The approval-to-publication interval is one day. All describe the same record, but they measure different parts of its history. A chart labeled only “delay: three days” would leave the reader guessing.

Common confusion

Publication delay is not emergency response time. The time a record becomes public does not establish when responders were dispatched or arrived. Those operational intervals require their own timestamps.

Reporting lag can refer to the earlier interval before information reaches an agency or reporting system. The terms sometimes overlap in ordinary use, so the source's definitions should control the calculation.

A publication delay also differs from a later correction. A record can be released promptly and revised afterward. The revision date is not necessarily its first public appearance.

Measuring the interval fairly

Use consistent milestones, time zones, and units. Calendar days and business days answer different timing questions. If the starting milestone is unavailable, do not substitute another date without changing the label.

For a summary across records, state whether the figure is an average, median, or percentile and identify which records were eligible. Records not yet published may be missing from the calculation, so a measure based only on released records may not describe the full pending workload.

Readers should also know whether an apparent delay comes from the source release or from a later website's retrieval cycle. Those are separate steps in the path to the displayed information.

Related terms

• Reporting lag
• Publication date
• Report date
• Data freshness

Sources

• City of Seattle: SPD Crime Data documentation — Local example of approval-related public-release timing. The four-date calculation is hypothetical and does not assert a required schedule.