Secondary and Desk Research

Secondary research means analyzing information that somebody has already collected, including published studies, industry reports, government data, competitor materials, and your own internal records. Primary research means collecting new data yourself through surveys, interviews, or observation. Most good projects use both, and secondary usually comes first.

Two to four weeks for most projects. A focused landscape review can be done faster. If the topic is broad or the sources are scattered, it takes longer, and we'll tell you which you have after an initial look.

It depends on how broad the topic is, how much source material there is to work through, and how deep the synthesis needs to go. Desk research is the least expensive research we do, and it's often the smartest place to start. We'll give you a fixed-scope quote after an initial consultation.

You can get a long way, and we use AI to accelerate this work too. The catch is that AI tools confidently produce citations that don't exist and figures that were never published, and they present both with the same certainty as accurate material. Every source in our work gets verified against the original, and the search is complemented by human desk research.

Yes. Our researchers hold doctorates and maintain access to the academic databases that peer-reviewed literature sits behind, along with the industry sources that aren't publicly available.

Then we'll tell you, and that's genuinely useful to know. A confident answer built on data that isn't there is worse than an honest gap. We'll also tell you what primary research would fill it and roughly what that would take.

Yes, and you should let us. Sales records, CRM notes, support tickets, and past research reports are all secondary sources, and organizations regularly commission new research to answer a question their own files already answer.

We look at who produced it, why, how the data was collected, and when. An industry figure published by a vendor selling into that industry gets weighted differently than a government dataset. We'll flag the ones we'd be cautious about, so you know which figures to lean on and which to treat carefully.

They overlap. A literature review focuses on peer-reviewed academic research and usually supports an academic or grant purpose. Desk research is broader and pulls in industry, government, competitor, and commercial sources for a business purpose. If your question is academic, a literature review is probably what you want.

Usually, yes. It's cheaper, it's faster, and it almost always improves the primary study that follows. You stop paying to answer questions that already have answers, and you spend your budget on the ones that don't.