Where should the line be drawn regarding political statements in a scientific report? I am writing a report on Fusion energy as an assignment. It contributes to a sperate qualification in Physics which is simply a Pass/Fail. Further studies will often not accept students who do not pass this section.

In this report, I have briefly looked into the current state of electricity generation, including the emissions from coal power plants, and the mining of coal. I found some excellent sources, but also one that had been deleted from the state.gov website. It was available here. It is still available on archive.org here.

Archive.org shows it was removed sometime between 12:45 and 19:54 on the 20th of January 2017. This does not seem to be a coincidence as many news sites reported on Trump ordering the EPA to remove climate change data.

Personal politics aside, I feel attempting to remove/removing any data from the internet is disgraceful, and I want to express that in my report. Currently, at the end of my bibliography I have this text:


  Note on Citation 30: UNITED STATES CLIMATE ACTION REPORT 2014. The Available URL provided is from archive.org’s WaybackMachine, a project which aims to archive public facing sites for the future, protecting them from removal. On the 20th of January 2017, this report was removed from the state.gov website. This appears to have been under the instruction of President Trump, as news sites reported data on the EPA website was removed. The provided archive.org link is the most recent version, from 23 December 2016.


Is this appropriate in the bibliography, or should I simply leave it at the first 2 sentences?
This appears to have been under the instruction of President Trump, as news sites reported data on the EPA website was removed.


Speculation usually doesn't belong in a scientific paper. This is especially true when it does not further the scientific purpose of the paper.

The rest of the statement - about the document no longer being available at its original link, and a note regarding its availability on archive.org, is fine because it is not speculation and serves an academic purpose. However, you actually don't need to resort to archive.org, because the document is still available on the archived state.gov site.

Like whitehouse.gov, the entire State Department website is routinely archived at the end of each administration, and the new administration can put whatever they want on their new site. (For example, at the beginning of the Obama administration, they replaced the Bush-era State Department site on climate change with their own.) The state.gov material from the Obama administration is still available; you just have to replace "www.state.gov" in the URL with "2009-2017.state.gov".

(P.S. an archive of the EPA website immediately before the transition, created in response to numerous FOIA requests, is also available: https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/)