The Stanford NOC project is intended to understand how NOCs have developed differently from each other. To this end there has to be comparison between the NOCs. In particular, this concerns their respective performances as oil companies. Measuring the performance of NOCs is difficult and controversial (Stevens 2008c). There are a great many metrics conventionally used. However, one common feature is that many depend either upon reserves or production levels. The implication is that the larger the reserve additions or the increase in production levels the better the performance.

The use of reserves and production data is reinforced for NOCs because they often exhibit extremely poor transparency of financial data commonly available for IOCs. Thus studies that purport to consider NOC behavior are often extremely dependent upon reserve and production data because this is (allegedly) the only consistently available data on NOCs.