Tips & tutorials for conducting research


Once you've created a user account and added yourself to your Research group, you can get started on your company research:

From your Project page, find your company, and click the “Research” button next the company to begin.

  • If you don’t see the source you need add a new source. Tag the company to the source, and *important*, tag “Corporate Social Responsibility Report” under Report Type if your researching sustainability metrics (see example here|see example here). This will ensure the source is pulled into your research page.

  • Watch the tutorial video if you get hung up on any of the technical details around using the platform

  • Add values that answer the metric questions, citing sources, indicating page numbers where you found the answers, and providing as much contextual information you think necessary to support others that will be looking at your data

  • When you open your source (i.e. company’s sustainability report), do a keyword search to look for a GRI index, or scroll towards the end of the report to find this. You can use this index or keyword search for GRI codes if the company includes these. If there is not, keyword search for your metric answers

  • When you do not find answers to metric questions, you can still answer the questions with “Unknown” in the value field. This allows others to see that the research has been conducted, but the company either doesn’t report this value, or reports something similar, but not in-line with the metric question. You can always leave useful additional information in the free-text “comments” box.

Trouble-shooting

  • Entered a wrong value? Double-click the value, then click the edit icon at top right. Change your value, click Submit.

  • Error message, or Wagn Hitch? Submit a Ticket and our development team will do their best to resolve the issue in a timely manner. Some errors are temporary, so you may want to just attempt the action a second or third time.

  • More questions? See the Using Wikirate page, Resources page, or FAQs page.

theresah.....2017-01-24 10:26:09 UTC