CSCIS is trusted and respected for its independents and objectivity. Objectivity is valued as a contributor to analytic success and helps to improve the likelihood that research will be used.

The Centre contributes to and facilitates discourse on cybersecurity, cyberspace, and helps improve cyber policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.CSCIS focuses on the issues that matter most: security, national security, cyber + international affairs, cyber law and business, and more.

• In the decade since CSCIS’s establishment, its focus has changed in many aspects of cyberspace. Cyber and policy issues have become more, critical, dynamic, and complex. The scope of CSCIS’s research agenda has expanded. Its approaches to cyber have diversified, as have the research products and services they require. Research methodologies and technologies have advanced and changed. Data, information, its collection and manipulation have multiplied.

Over time, one fundamental aspect of CSCIS’s research has never changed — the Centre’s commitment to high quality, independence, and objectivity. Each CSCIS report, whitepaper, article, OP-ED, and presentation is carefully peer-reviewed before its public release. CSCIS and its standards for high-quality articulate longstanding CSCIS concepts, ethics, ideals, and values regarding the characteristics of high-quality work. They are important tools for everyone involved in conducting, evaluating, and managing our research — the researchers, managers, and peer reviewers of our work.

They are also important to the users of the cyber, policymaking and research communities, who inherently have an interest in quality and how quality is assured. The standards described here help to ensure that CSCIS accomplishes its objectives of services, high-quality research, and analysis. 

• The problem should be well formulated, structured, and the purpose of the study should be clear
• The approach to the focus / subject of should be well designed and executed.
• The research should demonstrate and validate an understanding of related studies
• The data and information should be the best available
• Any assumptions should be clear, well developed, explicit, and justified
• The findings should advance knowledge and focus on important issues.
• The implications, interpretations, and recommendations should be logical, justified by the findings, and explained thoroughly with appropriate caveats
• The documentation should be clear, accurate, understandable, logically structured, presented, and temperate in tone.
• The study and its outdomes should be persuasive, compelling, useful, and relevant to the industry, its stakeholders and decisionmakers.

CSCIS and its work focuses on real-world problems and practical issues and must contribute to CSCIS’s mission of helping to improve cyberspace, policy, and decisionmaking through research and analysis.