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.
Eight rules.
01Every number says where it comes from.A figure of ours carries the day it was measured and how many rows it counts. A figure from outside carries its source and how far we checked that source.
02We measure on the day we publish.A number is never reused from an older note. The query is saved, run again, and the piece shows that day's result.
03Below 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.
04Clients are never named.Findings are totals across workspaces. No company, no person, no message text. A client can read a piece before it is published and can withdraw.
05Every piece argues against itself.Each one has a section called "What speaks against this", with the strongest evidence we could find against our own choice.
06We say what we cannot measure.When the recording behind a number is not reliable, we do not publish the number.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.
07Criteria 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.
08Legal pieces are reviewed by a lawyer.A guide about law says who reviewed it. No design choice of ours is presented as making anything lawful.
How we label a source.
Every source at the end of a piece carries one of these five labels.
read in the originalWe opened the law, paper, report or page itself and read the passage we cite.
abstract onlyThe full text is behind a paywall. We read the abstract and the bibliographic record, and cite only what those state.
vendor researchPublished by a company that sells something related. Useful, but the publisher has an interest in the result.
secondaryWe know it only through another source. We say so, and we do not quote numbers from it as fact.
our own measurementCounted in our own platform data, with the method note at the end of the piece.