On this page, we'll give you an insight into our operational model, analyzing how we balance between generating revenue and maintaining our credibility and independence. Our robust relationships with schools, our use of advertising, and our unique proprietary methodology all work together to support our mission of providing free advice to students and ensuring we remain a trusted resource for our readers.
Research.com is an innovative platform dedicated to providing current, well-researched, and useful information on colleges and universities to help students make fact-based decisions about their educational and career paths. We offer our readers a wide range of free resources focused on education, career planning, and financial aid available to students, as well as rankings of colleges and universities.
Simply put, Research.com operates as a for-profit organization.
But rest assured, we have a carefully engineered system that's both transparent and fair.
Firstly, our primary source of income stems from collaborating with educational institutions.
Schools compensate us for advertising their programs on our site, and we earn a referral fee when prospective
students decide to enroll in these programs. We believe transparency is key - therefore, we ensure schools
cannot influence our content or school rankings with their compensations.
Secondly, we also work together with Google AdSense.
This provides us with a base of revenue that runs independently from our school partnerships. Essentially, we
get paid whenever a visitor clicks on the ads displayed on our website. It's important to us that you
understand which content is sponsored and which isn't. To achieve this, we've implemented clear advertising
disclosures throughout our site. Any piece of content that is sponsored, or with an advertisement associated
with it, will be clearly marked as such. You'll see these labels disclosed visibly in an unambiguous manner.
Our intention is to make sure you never feel misled, and always know exactly what you're viewing on our
platform. It's just one more way we commit ourselves to honesty and integrity, providing you the best possible
resources for your academic research.
At Research.com, we understand the importance of maintaining a steadfast editorial independence despite operating as a for-profit website. Our core objective is to provide accurate, unbiased, and comprehensive guides and resources to assist college and university students in making informed decisions. To aid in this, we've developed a unique methodology that adheres to high standards and transparent procedures based on well-established metrics. That methodology guides all our evaluation of college programs making it impossible for the rankings to be affected by any business relations we may have with any of the schools or other partners.
In our rankings we don't rely on the opinion of a group of selected scientists, nor send our surveys, as such data might be inaccurate. Instead, we build our rankings based on hard, numerical data, either publicly available or from well-established, credible organizations with years of experience in data gathering. The general information about the college, the admissions, graduations, campus facilities are based on the latest editions of IPEDS and Peterson's databases. The information about salaries is taken from the College Scorecard database, while the security data is taken from CSS - Campus Safety and Security database. In the spirit of full transparency and commitment to responsible reporting, our team acknowledges the paramount importance of editorial integrity. Crafting reliable, informative content is a responsibility we bear with utmost seriousness, and it's this principle that forms the backbone of our operation at Research.com.
We invite and encourage all our readers to learn more about our stringent editorial policies that ensure the delivery of unbiased, rigorous content. Further details about our ethical guidelines, journalistic values, and our editorial process can be found on our Editorial Policy page.