Consumer Reports works hard to ensure your feedback about particular products makes a difference. Our organization has a long history of analyzing and applying user insights to help consumers make wise purchase decisions, and to actively pressure companies to improve their products and services. So if you're thinking of writing a user review for a particular product, we hope you'll seriously consider giving it to us. Below are some of the ways we will put your insights to good use.

Assisting other subscribers.

First and foremost, your user review will help other subscribers make smart decisions about their purchases. Many of you have told us individual user reviews are critical in helping you evaluate whether or not to purchase particular products. Your personal, anecdotal insights complement and extend our science-based survey ratings and test results, and provide other users with an even richer sense of how a particular product performs.

When you write a review, you are extending a valuable service to fellow Consumer Reports subscribers, who will appreciate your efforts - and no doubt do the same for you.

Helping us become better testers.

We are enormously proud of our National Testing and Research Center in Yonkers, N.Y., which is the largest nonprofit educational and consumer product testing center in the world. More than 100 testing experts work in four major technical operations - appliances and home improvement, auto test, electronics, and product safety & health. We use state-of-the-art testing equipment. And actual tests are based not just on government and industry standards but also on standards our specialists think should apply.

Your user reviews can help us build-on this unique testing program. In a practical sense, we believe reviewers like you help us extend test labs into your living rooms. Our in-house community team and experts will regularly review select feedback from you. If we see a pattern of reviews or complaints about a particular model or feature, our engineers will shine our testing spotlight on it to explore the issue further. Assisted by your reviews, we will continue to provide the comprehensive, unbiased evaluations you've come to expect from Consumer Reports.

Helping us become better researchers.

The Consumer Reports National Research Center is a research arm of Consumer Report's National Testing and Research Center. The highly-trained social scientists in this group use state-of-the art techniques to survey well over one million consumers each year for their feedback on a broad range of experiences with products, services and health care. Our biggest effort, The Consumer Reports Annual Questionnaire, is sent to all subscribers each spring and receives and a huge response from our subscribers.

Your user reviews will also benefit this unique research program. Our analysts will also selectively review the information you provide to us via your reviews. If we spot issues with particular models based on your feedback, we will focus our research analysts in these areas. Additional survey work may be performed, and we will report the results back to you. Going forward, our social scientists will also be experimenting with new text mining methodologies to extract additional insights from your user-reviews. We hope these new techniques will allow us to quickly and accurately identify issues raised by our user reviewers, for further exploration.

Can you trust user reviews - and our analysis?

User reviews can be enormously helpful, but you should be aware of certain caveats when reading them. Remember that Consumer Reports doesn't control the information posted by consumer reviewers. We hope those sharing their opinions actually own the items, but we can't verify this. There's also chance a manufacturer or retailer has submitted an opinion in order to promote a particular item, and that opinion may not be as honest as you would like. If you think that someone is writing inaccurate or misleading reviews of a product, you can bring it to our attention using the "flag this review" link under the review.

In terms of formal analysis and reports we provide based on user feedback, you should feel very confident in any official insights our testers and researchers present. Consumer Reports is free of corporate influence and advertising. Our surveys and analysis are not commissioned or funded by industry, government, academia or big media. Rather, our reports are designed to gather unbiased, objective information from consumers for the sole purpose of informing and protecting consumers, and empowering consumers to protect themselves.