If you’re thinking about where to retire, you’ve probably stumbled on at least one of those Best Places to retire lists online, in magazines, or in books. But which lists are credible? And which suit your circumstances? To find out, MoneyWatch.com reviewed them and came away with surprising results.

Since you shouldn’t choose a place to live using outdated information, our analysis of retirement-places lists excludes any created before 2008. That left five leading raters: U.S. News, Money, Smart Money, TopRetirements.com, and RetirementLiving.com; together, they name 454 places.

The key thing to remember: The rankings vary widely in the scope of the places they consider and the statistical rigor they bring to their ranking. Some of the rankers, such as TopRetirements.com and RetirementLiving.com, consider a wide variety of reasonable criteria to get at a more rounded picture of “livability.” Others focus on one or two key factors to produce a very narrow sense of what makes a place “best.” U.S. News, for instance, lists best-retirement places ranging from ones that lean Republican (hello, Cincinnati) to ones filled with parks (Albuquerque).