What counts as a primary source
A primary source is one of: the U.S. Code as published by Congress (read via Cornell LII for stable annotated URLs), the Code of Federal Regulations as published in the eCFR, official VA.gov pages and the VA Adjudication Procedures Manual (M21-1), public laws by Pub. L. number, and precedential decisions of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals or the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
State VA department pages are primary for state-specific benefits. The VA.gov accreditation directory is primary for who is allowed to represent veterans before VA.
What does not count
Aggregator sites, law-firm marketing pages, AI-generated benefits summaries, and forum posts are not cited as authority. They may be useful for finding a topic to research, but VBN traces every claim back to the underlying CFR section, USC section, public law, or official VA publication before publishing.
How citations appear on the page
Citations appear in three places: inline (next to the rule they support, using the Cite component), in the page metadata block at the top of the page (the Sources panel), and in the JSON-LD Article schema as the citation field, which feeds search-engine and AI-overview systems.
Every page also carries a Last reviewed date. When a citation’s underlying source changes (for example, when a CFR section is amended), the page is updated and the date bumped in src/lib/seo/page-registry.ts.
Errors and corrections
When an error is found, the page is corrected and the dateModified bumped. Substantive corrections are noted in the commit message. The commitment is straightforward: cite the law as it is, not as we remember it being.