By Chelsea Conaboy Globe Staff

Consumer Reports magazine — long seen as an authority on the performance of automobiles, appliances, and air conditioners — is now rating a service commonly used but difficult to measure: your primary care doctor.

The July issue, on stands Thursday, includes a special ­insert scoring 487 Massachusetts adult and pediatric practices on how well doctors communicate with patients and specialists, whether the staff is courteous, and other measures meant to judge patients’ experience.

The ratings are a collaboration between the magazine and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, a coalition of insurers and other health care organizations in the state. The group has been surveying people about their experiences with doctors every two years since 2005 and publishing the data on its website. But past years’ data has gotten little traffic, said executive director Barbra Rabson.

Rating doctors across the country has posed a particular challenge for the magazine, which has about 120,000 subscribers in Massachusetts, said Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports Health ­Ratings Center.

“There’s 500 models of cars,” Santa said. “There’s 5,000 hospitals. We’re now rating around 3,500 hospitals. But there’s 500,000 full-time doctors. And doing the type of job that Consumer Reports standards suggests is daunting when you look at those kinds of numbers.”

Rabson said she is hoping patients will use the data, which ­also will be published on her organization’s website as it appears in the magazine, to find a doctor or to assess their current care.

“It is a learning tool,” she said. “It’s this education, to say, ‘This is what you should ­expect.’ ”