Documentary traceability in international policy information systems: From evaluation flags to retrievable evidence

International policy databases must connect evaluation claims to inspectable evidence. Using a September 2026 EC–OECD STIP Compass export of 8609 initiatives in 63 economies, this study separates affirmative evaluation status, strict documentary URL provision, dated automated HTTP success, and semantic record-to-document correspondence. We checked 775 unique URLs and estimated economy-clustered logistic models. Among 1129 affirmative records, 557 supplied a strict URL and 313 returned a successful automated response. In a separate purposive diagnostic screen of 12 recorded destinations, seven met the strict initiative-match and substantive-evidence criteria; this is not an estimate for the 313 successful-response records. Within this inventory, middle-income records had lower adjusted odds of URL provision and automated response, while the evaluation-status difference was inconclusive. The study identifies distinct documentary losses requiring different information-management responsibilities rather than measuring evaluation quality or national capacity.