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Project selection and evaluation
As we are paying evaluators and have limited funding, we cannot evaluate every paper and project. Through October 2022, papers have come into our database (and will continue to do so) through
- 1.submission by authors;
- 2.our own searches (e.g., searching syllabi, forums, working paper archives, and white papers); and
- 3.suggestions from other researchers, practitioners, and members of the public. We have posted more detailed instructions for how to suggest research for evaluation.
Our management team rates the suitability of each paper according to the criteria discussed below and in the aforementioned linked post.
We have followed a few procedures for finding and prioritizing papers and projects. Generally, we allow all members of our management team to "vote" on how much to prioritize a paper before selecting it. In all cases, we require more than one member of our management team (or field specialist team) to support a paper before prioritizing it.
We are working to build a justified and systematic procedure as well as to give managers and field specialists some autonomy in prioritizing key papers and projects. As noted elsewhere, we are considering targets for particular research areas and sources.
See (internal discussion):
- Airtable: columns for "crucial_research", "considering" view, "confidence," and "discussion"
Through October 2022: For the papers or projects at the top of our list, we hcontacted the authors and asked if they wanted to engage, only pursuing evaluation if agreed.
As of November 2022, we have a second track where, under certain conditions, we inform authors but do not request permission. For this track, we first focused on particularly relevant NBER working papers.
July 2023: We expanded this process to some other sources, with some discretion.
In deciding which papers or projects to send out to paid evaluators, we have considered the following issues. We aim to communicate the team's answers for each paper or project to evaluators before they write their evaluations.
Consider: global priority importance, field relevance, open science, authors’ engagement, data and reasoning transparency. In gauging this relevance, the team may consider the ITN framework, but not too rigidly.
What are (some of) the authors’ main claims that are worth carefully evaluating? What aspects of the evidence, argumentation, methods, interpretation, etc., is the team unsure about? What particular data, code, proof, etc., would they like to see vetted? If it has already been peer-reviewed in some way, why do they think more review is needed?
How well has the author engaged with the process? Do they need particular convincing? Do they need help making their engagement with The Unjournal successful?
See What research to target? for further discussion of prioritization, scope, and strategic and sustainability concerns.
Last modified 4d ago