BlackRock Scientific Active Equity, the money management unit that was part of Barclays Global Investors before it was bought by BlackRock in 2009, has been a leader in these surveys. One of the company’s survey questions, titled “earnings surprise direction,” asks analysts whether a company’s coming profits “are more likely to surprise on the upside or downside.” Another asks: “Do you think the current consensus earnings forecast” for a specified period “will likely move upwards or downwards?”

A more recent question involves takeovers: “How likely is it that the company will be taken over in the next 6 months?”

The BlackRock surveys are careful to ask that analysts supply only those views that they have already stated publicly. But in various confidential documents describing the surveys, company officials state that nonpublic information is what they are after. “We expect the earnings surprise direction to be able to capture the information not released to the market,” stated a confidential BlackRock memo from November 2008, detailing its analyst surveys of nine brokerage firms in Asia. “The question may give the clue on the direction of the analyst’s future revisions.”

A 2009 document on the firm’s analyst surveys is even more explicit. “We are trying to front-run recs,” it said, referring to trading ahead of analysts’ recommendations.

James Badenhausen, a BlackRock spokesman, said, “The language in the Barclays Global Investors internal memos is sloppy and inaccurate and totally inconsistent not only with the stated purpose of the survey but also with the high ethical standards by which BlackRock does business. The survey explicitly states that it requests only information that sell-side research analysts have already disseminated publicly and an analyst cannot even take part in the survey without first clicking a button to confirm that answers would be based solely on public information.”

He continued in a statement, “The surveys allow the group to quantify information from tens of thousands of analyst research reports so they can feed that data into the computer models used in the group’s investment process. The data from these online surveys are just one of more than 100 different factors that the group feeds into the models to determine investment decisions.”

Mr. Badenhausen declined to make any other BlackRock executive available for comment.

Representatives for Citigroup, UBS and JPMorgan Chase said they had strict policies in place for analysts participating in client surveys requiring that their comments were consistent with their publicly held views. Representatives at Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.