Seeking definition of Jira's "Created vs. Resolved Issues Report"

[Kendall Alton]

Will someone kindly point me to a source that describes the algorithm for what designates a Defect as "resolved"? 

Is this the only information that is published?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira064/configuring-workflow-720412524.html 

Setting the Resolution field

In JIRA, an issue is either Open or Closed, based on the value of its Resolution field — not its Status field!

• An issue is Open if its Resolution field has not been set.
• An issue is Closed if its Resolution field has a value (e.g. Fixed, Cannot Reproduce).

This is true regardless of the current value of the issue's Status field (Open, In Progress, etc).

Therefore, if you need your workflow to force an issue to be Open or Closed, you will need to set the issue's Resolution field during a transition. There are two ways to do this:

• Set the Resolution field automatically via a post function.
• Prompt the user to choose a Resolution via a screen. See Working in text mode for details on this.

[Clark Everson · Accepted solution]

Yes this is accurate. You need to have the resolution field set in order for the report to work. 
this is one way to do it. Another is to use a transition screen

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/map-a-screen-to-a-workflow-transition-in-jira-server-720634253.html

You would use a post function as you outlined if the resolution should always be set to the same thing(done, duplicate , won’t fix etc) 

you should use the transition screen if you want to limit the number of done statuses or you want to have people select the why an issue is resolved. This allows for more granular reporting if it’s something your users desire while also limiting how many statuses are needed in your jira

resolution is a very important field that is often not set. I would recommend running the following jql on your jira instance and it will determine which workflows need to be updated 

statusCategory=Done AND resolution is EMPTY

you can then fix the resolutions by bulk changes or if you have script runner they have a built in script for this

https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/5.5.8/jira/builtin-scripts.html#_bulk_fix_resolutions