Analyst's Guide to Indicators (2025)
Randolph H. Pherson and John Pyrik
December 2025
Analyst’s Guide to Indicators provides analysts with a solid and comprehensive foundation for generating, validating, and presenting indicators. The Guide offers core definitions for different types of indicators, reviews when best to use them, suggests several techniques for generating and validating them, shows optimal ways to present them, and describes how indicators add value to your analysis. Experience-based examples explain the evaluative and descriptive indicators most often used by medical professionals and law enforcement analysts and the warning and estimative indicators commonly used in the intelligence community and the business world.
Note on this Edition
This edition reflects the transition of Randolph H. and Katherine Hibbs Pherson’s intellectual property from Pherson Associates, LLC to Globalytica, LLC. This version also documents the passing of Randolph H. Pherson (1949–2024) and includes updates to citations and references to provide the most current sources available.
