Research / method
How we measure
The rules every number on the Research pages follows: what we count, what we leave out, and how we label a source.
The rules
Eight rules.
- Every number says where it comes from.A figure of ours says how many records it counts. A figure from outside carries its source and how far we checked that source.
- Every number carries the day it was measured.A number is never reused from an older note. The query is saved and run again for the piece, and the piece shows that day's result and that date. A piece scheduled ahead shows the day it was measured, not the day it went live.
- Below a hundred, we give counts.Twenty-four of ninety-six says more than 25%. Percentages appear only when the group is large enough to carry them.
- Clients are named only when they ask to be, in writing.Everything else is totals across workspaces. No other client name, no person, no real message text; a rewritten example says so. A client can read a piece before it is published and can withdraw.
- Every piece argues against itself.Each one has a section called "What speaks against this" or its equivalent, with the strongest evidence we could find against our own choice.
- We say what we cannot measure.When the recording behind a number is not reliable, we do not publish the number. We publish why it is not reliable.
- Criteria are not compared across clients.Each client defines their own scoring criteria, so a score in one workspace does not mean the same in another.
- A legal piece waits for a lawyer.A guide about law says who reviewed it, and none goes out before one has. No lawyer has read anything here yet. No design choice of ours is presented as making anything lawful.
Source labels
How we label a source.
Every source at the end of a piece carries one of these five labels.
- read in the original
- We opened the law, paper, report or page itself and read the passage we cite.
- abstract only
- The full text is behind a paywall. We read the abstract and the bibliographic record, and cite only what those state.
- vendor research
- Published by a company that sells something related. Useful, but the publisher has an interest in the result.
- secondary
- We know it only through another source. We say so, and we do not quote numbers from it as fact.
- our own measurement
- Counted in our own platform data, with the method note at the end of the piece.
Free first look
See who should buy from you this quarter.
Leave your work email. SYNC reads your company’s website and sends you a first look: what you sell, who probably buys it, and up to five companies scored A to D, each with its source.
