Understanding how competitors are developing their content or services is a key area for publishers and intermediaries alike.

Simon Inger Consulting has performed a number of comparisons for publishers that look at key competing publishers' web sites and assess not just technology features, but also customer service features, navigational issues, clarity and advertised policies in key areas such as pre-prints, open access, article submissions, author services, social networking and so on.

Publishers may also wish to study their titles' overlap with competing titles and study which authors are publishing articles in other journals which may have been appropriate for the publisher's own journals. SIC uses text analysis techniques to provide insights into these complicated issues. Such techniques not only reveal the degree of content overlap from one journal to another, but can also show how diverse a researcher might be in his output. See also Citation Analysis.

Competitor analysis is also a key area in Product Development for any intermediary.