Coverage register

For each province: how many of its documents we hold, how they were collected, and an estimate of how much of its provincial government's numbered documents that is. Read every count on this site against this table. The estimate is possible for 10 of 31 provinces; for the rest we hold too few numbered government documents to bound the total, and their coverage should be taken as sparse.

How to read it

• Gov. series held estimates the share of the provincial government's and its general office's numbered documents (苏政发, 粤府办, 闽政 …) that we hold, 2016–25. Within a series, numbers run 1…N through the year; from the numbers we hold, N is estimated as m + m/k − 1 (m the largest number held, k how many). Series whose largest number is more than three times what we hold are left out here: they may number internal letters that are never published.
• All series includes those series. It mixes our gaps with documents the government never publishes, so it is a floor, not an estimate.
• Neither figure covers departments, cities or counties: they have no series we can bound. A province can score well here and still miss department documents. For example, Hunan's and Beijing's 2024 equipment-renewal plans are not held.
• A series of which we hold nothing is invisible to the estimate, so where whole series are missing the share overstates coverage.
• Collection: enumerated, the government portal's listings were walked in full (this does not mean every document is held: compare the estimate); portal, listings crawled in part; archived, mostly web-archive copies; cited, reached only through citations and searches.