About ProductCritic Scores

What Is the ProductCritic Score?

The whole point of this site is to provide one single rating that you can use to compare different products. The ProductCritic Score combines all the professional reviews of a product into one weighted score that gives a good indication of the relative "goodness" of a product and the consensus opinion of all reviewers. The higher the score, the higher the general reviews of that product. This score should help guide you towards answers to the questions, "Is this a good product?" and "Is this product better than this other one?".

How Do We Calculate The ProductCritic Score?

We scour the internet to find all the reviews for a product, capture the score that reviewers provide, and convert it into a number from 0-100. For example, a review giving 3 out of 5 stars to a product would translate to a review score of 60. When a review does not actually provide an explicit score, we assign a score based on the general impression we get from the review. For each product, you will see a list of all the reviews of a product and the associated scores along with a link to the actual review so you can read it for yourself. As more reviews are added for a product, the ProductCritic Score can change as the additional reviews are incorporated into the calculation.

We then combine all the individual review scores to get a final ProductCritic Score that is a weighted average of all the individual reviews. We weight this average because we assign more significance and importance to the reviewers that provide higher quality reviews. Therefore, a review score from CNET would play a larger part in determining the final ProductCritic Score than a review score from a small web site.

What Do The Colors And Shapes Mean?

To make it even easier for you to see the general consensus opinion of the reviews, each score is identified by a different shape.
= good review
= moderate review
= poor review.

Each product category has a variety of reviewers that do not share the same scale when giving ratings. Since these scales can be different for each category, we assign different score ranges of good, moderate, and poor reviews depending on the category. For instance, a "good" rating for digital cameras may be 85+ while a "good" rating for camcorders may be 80+.

I Don't Trust Your ProductCritic Score

Since we also use ProductCritic to help with our purchases, we try to be as impartial as possible. We do not actually review any products ourselves and do not have any vested interest in the ProductCritic Score that is calculated. Even if you don't trust that score, we believe that the site will still be helpful to you as a place that collects and links all the reviews for the product you're interested in so you can read the reviews for yourself.

Missing Reviews

Although we attempt to be as comprehensive as possible in capturing all the reviews for a product, we're human and may overlook a review. If you notice this, please let us know and we'll add that review.

Reviewer Disagreements

For reviews that do not include an explicit score, we assign one based on the general impression we get from the review. If you are the writer of one of these reviews and disagree with the rating that we assigned to your review, please contact us and we will change it.