Three judgments about a report should remain distinct:
First — overall distribution: How many transmission routes exist and how are they distributed among generations? This concerns the broad categories of mashhur, aziz, and gharib.
Second — position of singularity: If a link is isolated, is it at the original pivotal point or only relative to a particular transmitter? This yields absolute and relative singularity.
Third — acceptance or rejection: Is the chain connected, are its narrators reliable, and is the report free of decisive anomalies or hidden defects? This is a separate critical task.
Finding a report in several books does not by itself answer even the first question completely, much less the third. The underlying relationships among chains must be reconstructed.