TLDR

The Unjournal is seeking ‘pivotal questions’ to guide our choice of research papers to commission for evaluation; express your interest/offer suggestions here. See the full protocol for this project in our knowledge base here (link fixed).

What do we mean by 'pivotal questions'? We're contacting organizations that aim to use evidence to do the most good, and asking:

Which open questions most affect your policies and funding recommendations?
(Relatedly) For which questions would more research and evaluation yield the highest ‘value of information’?

About The Unjournal

The Unjournal commissions public evaluations of impactful research in quantitative social sciences fields.^[1] We are an alternative and a supplement to traditional academic peer-reviewed journals – separating evaluation from journals and making this public unlocks a range of benefits. We ask expert evaluators to write detailed, constructive, critical reports. We also solicit a set of structured ratings focused on research credibility, methodology, careful and calibrated presentation of evidence, reasoning transparency, replicability, relevance to global priorities, and usefulness for practitioners (including funders, project directors, and policymakers who rely on this research).^[2]

While we have mainly targeted impactful research from academia, our ‘applied stream’ covers impactful work that uses formal quantitative methods but is not aimed at academic journals. So far, we’ve commissioned about 40 evaluations of 21 papers, and published these evaluation packages on our PubPub community, linked to academic search engines and bibliometrics.

New Pilot: “Evaluating Pivotal Questions”

Our main approach has been to search for papers and then commission experts to publicly evaluate them. Our field specialist teams search and monitor prominent research archives (like NBER), and consider agendas from impactful organizations, while keeping an eye on forums and social media.^[3] Our approach has largely been to look for research that seems relevant to impactful questions and crucial considerations.^[4] We're now exploring the idea of turning this on its head and identifying pivotal questions first. If we start with pivotal questions and then evaluate a cluster of research that informs these questions, this might offer a more efficient ...

Unjournal: Pivotal Questions/Claims project