Statistics
Safety Data Index — methods
What is counted
- A notice is one publication by a public safety agency. It can cover many products, sizes or countries, and one recall can produce several notices (some agencies publish one notice per product).
- The month is the agency's own alert or publication date. Pharmaceutical notices (medicines, vaccines, cannabis, natural health products) are excluded. The set of notices is the same one behind the monthly Recall Index and the brand scorecards, so the numbers agree.
- Categories, countries and hazards are the agencies' own classifications. Labels that clearly mean the same thing in different languages are merged; nothing else is reclassified. Hazards come from the EU Safety Gate risk type only, because it is the one agency field that records a hazard in a consistent vocabulary.
- Brands: the brand or recalling company exactly as printed in the notice, compared without regard to letter case, over a rolling 24 months; placeholders such as “unbranded” are excluded, and U.S. FDA medical-device notices are excluded as on the scorecards. Notices per brand are not adjusted for company size, sales or number of models, so they do not measure safety. We do not publish a recall rate per brand: agency brand names cannot yet be linked reliably to product counts.
- Provisional months: the current and previous month change as agencies keep publishing; U.S. FDA notices arrive 4–10 weeks after the recall starts.
Small numbers
Any cell under 10 notices is shown as “<10” and left blank, with a flag, in the CSV.
Verification
Each edition is computed twice: once by streaming the notices through a program and once inside the database by independent queries (per-month counts, grouped totals, the scorecards' own per-brand query). It is published only if every figure matches exactly — 1,617 figures compared for the latest edition. The checker is itself tested by planting errors in a copy of an edition and confirming each one is caught.
Licence and corrections
CC BY 4.0 — cite “ProductGuru, Safety Data Index” with a link. Notice-level data: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22685727. Errors: see corrections. Figures are computed by program; the text was written with AI assistance. Product statistics follow their own methods.