Deduplication key
A stable key derived from a record's own contents so that reprocessing the same source does not create a second copy.
Updated 2026-07-26
Sources republish. Indexes are re-fetched, lists are downloaded again, corrections resend whole files. Without a key derived from the content itself, every rerun would multiply the records.
The key is built from the fields that identify the underlying fact — the source, the document, the entity, the kind of event — and not from the time of processing. Two runs over the same document therefore produce the same key and the second one changes nothing.
This is what makes ingestion safe to repeat, and repeatability is what makes it possible to fix a parser and reprocess history without inventing events.
Related terms
3 entries- Accession number
- The unique identifier of one submission to EDGAR, in the form 0001234567-25-000123.
- Entity resolution
- Deciding whether two records from different sources describe the same company or person.
- List snapshot
- One complete downloaded version of a published list, stored with the date the source published it.
Where this appears in the data
Written for reading the records published here. This is not a legal, tax or accounting definition, and where a jurisdiction defines the term precisely, that definition governs.