Research summaries

Summaries that quietly change what a source said

The common failure in a research summary is not omission but drift. A report says a trend was observed in one region among large firms, and the summary says the trend is happening. Three summaries later, a narrow finding has become a general fact and is quoted in a board paper.

We guard against that with citations to the page, not just the document. A reader who doubts a sentence can open the source at the right place in seconds. Where we interpret rather than report, the briefing says so in plain words, so you always know which statements are the source's and which are ours.

Not all sources deserve equal weight

A peer-reviewed study of ten thousand people and a vendor survey of two hundred customers can reach opposite conclusions. A summary that gives them a paragraph each, side by side, leaves the reader thinking the question is evenly balanced when it is not. Weighing sources is the work; listing them is not.

The source table records what you need to judge each one: who produced it, who paid for it, when the data was collected, how large the sample was and how the method holds up. Old data gets flagged, because a market report from four years ago may describe a market that no longer exists.

Where the sources genuinely disagree, we show the disagreement and the likely reason for it, such as different definitions, populations or time periods. That is often the most useful part of the briefing, because it tells you what a confident answer would actually require.