Article 8 — Data sources and methods

1. Member States and the Commission (Eurostat) shall use one or more of the following data sources, provided that such data sources allow for the production of statistics that meet the quality requirements laid down in Article 11: (a) administrative data sources; (b) statistical surveys or other statistical data collections; (c) other sources including privately held data; (d) the use of data derived from data sharing among national statistical institutes and other national authorities included on the list referred to in Article 5(2) of Regulation (EC) No 223/2009, including those of other Member States, and between those institutes and authorities and the Commission (Eurostat), within the European Statistical System (ESS). 2. In the event that a request submitted by a national statistical institute or the Commission (Eurostat) to a private data holder in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 concerns personal data from data sources referred to in paragraph 1, point (c), of this Article, that request shall be limited to the personal data categories covered by the domains and topics specified in the Annex to this Regulation or necessary for the statistical estimation methods in accordance with Article 3(6), point (b). 3. Member States shall aim to continuously develop innovative sources and methods and use them to improve statistics compiled under this Regulation, provided that they allow for the production of statistics that meet the quality requirements laid down in Article 11. 4. The statistics compiled under this Regulation shall be based on statistically sound and well-documented methods, taking into account international recommendations and best practice such as signs of life and other scientifically based statistical estimation methods used for compiling statistics on usually resident population in the Member States.