Guideline:Proprietary studies

See also: Guidelines

Discussion: Guideline:Proprietary studies

This article describes principles when conducting proprietary studies. The principles are also important principles for good articles.

What are Proprietary studies?

A proprietary study is an effort of deriving new insights from publicly accessible or self collected data on a certain topic by systematically analyzing the available data. It usually contains

• an study objective
• a description of definitions
• a methodology description incl. descriptions of steps taken, sample sizes etc.
• main findings
• reconciliations of our findings with other publicly available data and findings
• closing thoughts and assessments incl. on the reliability of the new insights.

Principles

• Granularity. We would want to use granular language which helps us to communicate nuances in how reliable informations and conclusions are.
• Accuracy. The study has to be granular and contain informations about the solidity of it's evidence and conclusions. It has to make a positive contributions to the accuracy of the overall picture.
• Transparency. We want to avoid appearing authoritative or avoid the unrealistic appearance of 100% truth and objectivity. Instead we want to be very transparent about our process, thoughts, way of working. That is in line with our key transparency value.
• Verifiability. We want to empower the reader to verify all informations himself and access all our sources. This way he does not have to have trust in quality of our work and methodology but can instead verify it himself.
• Accessibility. It just be easily possible for a unrelated third party reader to comprehend and reconstruct the study. Therefore explanations have to be sufficiently easy and clear to understand for newcomers. Newcomers should get all relevant informations directly from the article without having to access citations.
• Well connected. All relevant sources need to be connected.
• Inviting. We want to invite others to challenge our thoughts or contribute to them.
• Evolving. By being accurate, transparent, accessible and inviting our goal is to build ever evolving models that reflect reality increasingly better. This is in line with our strive for excellence value.

Language principles

• Reference back to definitions. How do we or how is someone else defining a term? Use language that makes clear that we are references back to a specific definitions instead of giving the appearance that the definition we use the the absolut truth.
• Highlight confidence in conclusions. Clearly differentiate between possibilities, likely correlations and high confidence correlations. Examine your conclusions for logical stringence and cogency. Are there other logical possibilities or factors to consider?
• Highlight future work. Highlight knowledge gaps and areas of further improvement.