OSINT & Intelligence Analysis
What open-source intelligence is, how the intelligence cycle applies to it, which analytic techniques reduce bias, and how to verify what you find.
Turn open information into sound judgement
Practical, sourced guides to OSINT, competitive intelligence, research analytics and how AI is changing the way information is found.
Topics
Competitive Intelligence
How to run competitive intelligence that informs decisions: key intelligence topics, sources, frameworks, early-warning signals and the legal line on trade secrets.
Patent & Innovation Intelligence
A practical guide to patent landscapes: what patents reveal, how to build a search, which indicators to use, the pitfalls, and the debate about patent assertion entities.
Disinformation & Rumours
What research says about why false news spreads faster than the truth, why debunking sometimes fails, and which approaches, such as prebunking, actually help.
Think Tanks & Policy Research
How think tanks work, from RAND to China's new-type think tanks, how their influence is measured, and why independence and transparency matter.
Research Analytics & Bibliometrics
How the main research metrics are calculated, what they can and cannot tell you, how to map a field with citation data, and why research evaluation is moving beyond them.
Knowledge Management & Knowledge Graphs
What knowledge graphs are, how they relate to knowledge management and ontologies, how to build one, and why they matter again in the age of large language models.
Cyber & Information Security Strategy
What cyber threat intelligence is, the frameworks analysts use (kill chain, Diamond Model, ATT&CK), how it is shared, and how national cyber strategies shape it.
AI, Search & Information Retrieval
How search engines and AI assistants retrieve and cite sources, what retrieval-augmented generation is, and what publishers can do to be found and cited in AI answers.
Latest articles
- Analysis of Competing Hypotheses: a step-by-step example
How to use ACH, the structured technique that tests every piece of evidence against every explanation, with a worked example and a ready-to-copy matrix.
- Entity resolution: the hardest part of building a knowledge graph
Why deciding when two records refer to the same person or company is so hard, the main techniques from rules to machine learning, and how to measure quality.
- How to build a patent search: keywords, IPC and CPC
A step-by-step method for building a reliable patent search strategy that combines keywords, classification codes and applicant names, and for testing it.
- Journal Impact Factor vs CiteScore vs SJR: which journal metric to use
How the three main journal metrics are calculated, how they differ in data source, citation window and weighting, and how to use them sensibly.
- Intelligence vs information: why 情报 is hard to translate
The Chinese word qingbao covers both intelligence and information. Here is how the concept developed, why it confuses translators, and what it means for research.
- How to map a research field with OpenAlex and VOSviewer
A free, step-by-step workflow for building a map of any research field: define the query, export from OpenAlex, build networks in VOSviewer and interpret the clusters.