I have 12 items to get into a single rank order. Can I get this from having a few hundred people see a set of 10 of the possible pairs of items? I attempted to run a study where people had to rank order 12 statements from best to worst.  However, it was extremely messy and difficult for people to rank that many items.  Now, my professor and I have decided instead to show people 2 statements at a time and just rate which one is higher.  Since it would be way too much to ask people to make every possibly comparison within the set of 12, we'd give each person a subset, maybe 10 from the full set of possible pairs.
I've tried to look up methods to analyze them, but everything I've checked into is not quite right.  Some require each person to have rated the full set, like Borda's method or other voting ranking systems.  Others don't seem take into account the within-subjects factor, like the Bradley Terry model.  And searching for the issue of ranking usually gives me ways to test whether two groups are different, as opposed to one population.  For some of these though, I'm not sure if they test/model can't do what I need or if I just don't understand how it is applied.  Eventually I'll have the data in R, so for each participant I'll have a set of 10 pairs and how they ranked each one; I haven't figured out how to apply the models to that, though the BradleyTerry2 package seems closest.
Can anyone help me figure out if this analysis is possible before I run the study?  Will I be able to get a single, ordered list of the 12 statements with the method I have sketched out?  Thank you in advance!
 A: If you're interested in use (more than in development), you should give a try to rankade, our ranking system. Rankade can manage small to large playing groups (composed by players or 'items', as per your needs), and it features rankings (and stats, and more). It doesn't cover all your tasks, maybe, but it should be a useful tool to reach your target (rank order 12 statements from best to worst, both with global and partial rankings).
Rankade's algorithm (that is not in public domain, for the time being - here's a comparison between most known ranking systems - but rankade is free and easy to use) can manage, within different scopes, any kind of match. Due to faction structure, you can record outputs for 1-on-1 comparison, or for 2+ items as well (even mixing both kind of 'matches'), while Bradley-Terry model or other ranking system (like most known Elo or Glicko) don't. It's surely true that it's extremely messy and difficult for people to rank that many (twelve!) items, but a multiple comparison (e.g. 3-7 statements) should be suitable and useful, in your work.
