How Leap Trends counts.

We count publications by authorities: a study, a survey, a policy document or law, a press release accompanying a report, or an opinion piece by an expert. We count them per month, by date of publication. Publications that do not (yet) belong to a briefing count too. The chart on the home page counts all publications; the one on a briefing's page counts only that briefing's publications.

We collect academic articles from universities in Europe and North America through OpenAlex, an open database of scholarly publications. We use only the title, authors, institution, date and abstract. A briefing only takes articles that were at most a year old at the time of the search, come from a core journal and deal with the same phenomenon, even if they point the other way; ten per briefing at most. All the selection rules. These articles appear separately on the briefing's page under University research and count as publications, classed as research.

A source is given a sector when the publication is about organisations in that sector, such as a survey of banks or a report on regional healthcare. Most sources cover several sectors and get no sector. A briefing counts for a sector as soon as one of its sources does. So the sector filter shows where the sector itself appears in the publications; the briefings that cover all sectors apply there too.

Types of publication

Research

Peer-reviewed or methodologically sound research, meta-analyses, longitudinal series.Method and sample are public and can be checked, often over several years or reviewed by others. The outcome depends least on who is saying it.

Survey

A one-off or annual survey with a known sample, usually by a firm or an institute.A known sample, but it measures what people say. The client often chooses the questions and which results are made public.

Policy

A policy document, law, agreement or guideline from a government, regulator or umbrella body; facts about what has been agreed.Establishes what has been agreed or is required. Strong as a fact, but it says nothing about what organisations do in practice.

Press release

A press release accompanying a study or report; we report what it says, in our own words.Refers to a measurement, but leaves out most of the method and picks the results.

Opinion

An article or essay by an expert or professor, without a measurement of its own.Shows what an authority is drawing attention to, without a measurement of its own.

In the counts, every publication carries the same weight, whatever its type: ten opinion pieces weigh as much as ten studies. The type is shown with every publication, so you can decide for yourself what to read.

Every publication gets one organisational condition (structure, culture, leadership or technology) and one to three themes from a fixed list per condition. These are assigned with AI, based on the title and, for academic articles, the abstract. A theme only counts if the publication is genuinely about it; a passing mention is not enough. If no theme fits, the publication gets none and only counts towards the condition's total.

A briefing belongs to the condition in which an organisation has to change in order to respond. The trigger does not decide the condition: AI is often the trigger, while the change usually sits in another condition. The rule for each condition

For each condition, every theme shows how many of the past year's publications cover it, for example “in 12 of the 140”. The themes with the most publications come first. A publication can belong to more than one theme, so the numbers do not add up to the total.

An upward arrow (↑) means that the theme's share over the last three months is at least one and a half times its share in the three months before, with at least three publications in the last three months. The collection itself is growing too, so a small rise says little.

Publications are not added at a fixed moment, and some are found by hand. Recent months are therefore often less complete than older ones, which can make a fall in the last few months look bigger than it really is.

The pages of the five most discussed themes per condition carry three to five conclusions: what the publications on the theme show when taken together. They are compiled with AI, in our own words, from the publications themselves, and each conclusion lists the publications it rests on. The same page shows the topics within the theme.

A briefing is an overview, compiled with AI, of what several organisations publish on a topic: the gist, the main figures with their source, and what it means for the leadership team. A topic only gets a briefing once at least two independent organisations publish on it, at least one of them based on research or a survey. The text is drafted with AI; we use Claude, a language model made by Anthropic.

Leap does not edit the running text for content, nor the conclusions on the theme pages. Key figures labelled Checked have been compared with the source by a person; the others say Not yet checked. If in doubt, read the source itself. More on AI and checks