Country coverage. PlainCountries tracks all 217 countries and territories recognised by the World Bank country metadata. Regional groupings use the World Bank's 7-region classification (East Asia & Pacific, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America & Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa). Source: World Bank country and lending groups metadata.

Inclusion rule. A country appears in a ranking only if the upstream source (World Bank, WHO, ILO, OECD, or USGS) has published a value for that country within the indicator's current reporting cycle. Countries without a value are not shown on the ranking and are not assigned a rank — we never impute missing values or extrapolate from prior years.

Indicator definitions. Indicator names, units, and definitions are taken verbatim from the upstream agency's metadata API. Where two sources measure the same concept slightly differently (for example, infant mortality from the World Bank versus WHO), we preserve both with clear source attribution rather than merge them.

Vintage. The directory refreshes weekly. Every entry shows its source agency, indicator code, and observation year. For the full per-indicator methodology, visit the methodology page.