As of December 2023, the prizes below have been chosen and will be soon announced. We are also scheduling an event linked to this prize. However, we are preparing for even larger author and evaluator prizes for our next phase. Submit your research to The Unjournal or serve as an evaluator to be eligible for future prizes (details to be announced).
Submit your work to be eligible for our “Unjournal: Impactful Research Prize” and a range of other benefits including the opportunity for credible public evaluation and feedback.
First-prize winners will be awarded $, and the runner-ups will receive $1000.
Note: these are the minimum amounts; we will increase these if funding permits.
Prize winners will have the opportunity (but not the obligation) to present their work at an online seminar and prize ceremony co-hosted by The Unjournal, Rethink Priorities, and EAecon.
To be eligible for the prize, submit a link to your work for public evaluation here.
Please choose “new submission” and “Submit a URL instead.”
The latter link requires an ORCID ID; if you prefer, you can email your submission to
The Unjournal, with funding from the Long Term Future Fund and the Survival and Flourishing Fund, organizes and funds public-journal-independent feedback and evaluation. We focus on research that is highly relevant to global priorities, especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation, and aim to expand this widely. We encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
We aim to publicly evaluate 15 papers (or projects) within our pilot year. This award will honor researchers doing robust, credible, transparent work with a global impact. We especially encourage the submission of research in "open" formats such as hosted dynamic documents (Quarto, R-markdown, Jupyter notebooks, etc.).
The research will be chosen by our management team for public evaluation by 2–3 carefully selected, paid reviewers based on an initial assessment of a paper's methodological strength, openness, clarity, relevance to global priorities, and the usefulness of further evaluation and public discussion. We sketch out these criteria here.
All evaluations, including quantitative ratings, will be made public by default; however, we will consider "embargos" on this for researchers with sensitive career concerns (the linked form asks about this). Note that submitting your work to The Unjournal does not imply "publishing" it: you can submit it to any journal before, during, or after this process.
If we choose not to send your work out to reviewers, we will try to at least offer some brief private feedback (please on this).
All work evaluated by The Unjournal will be eligible for the prize. Engagement with The Unjournal, including responding to evaluator comments, will be a factor in determining the prize winners. We also have a slight preference for giving at least one of the awards to an early-career researcher, but this need not be determinative.
Our management team and advisory board will vote on the prize winners in light of the evaluations, with possible consultation of further external expertise.
Deadline: Extended until 5 December (to ensure eligibility).
Note: In a subsection below, Recap: submissions, we outline the basic requirements for submissions to The Unjournal.
The prize winners for The Unjournal's Impactful Research Prize were selected through a multi-step, collaborative process involving both the management team and the advisory board. The selection was guided by several criteria, including the quality and credibility of the research, its potential for real-world impact, and the authors' engagement with The Unjournal's evaluation process.
Initial Evaluation: All papers that were evaluated by The Unjournal were eligible for the prize. The discussion, evaluations, and ratings provided by external evaluators played a significant role in the initial shortlisting.
Management and Advisory Board Input: Members of the management committee and advisory board were encouraged to write brief statements about papers they found particularly prize-worthy.
Meeting and Consensus: A "prize committee" meeting was held with four volunteers from the management committee to discuss the shortlisted papers and reach a consensus. The committee considered both the papers and the content of the evaluations Members of the committee allocated a total of 100 points among the 10 paper candidates. We used this to narrow down a shortlist of five papers.
Point Voting: The above shortlist and the notes from the accompanying discussion were shared with all management committee and advisory board members. Everyone in this larger group was invited to allocate up to 100 points among the shortlisted papers (and asked to allocate fewer points if they were less familiar with the papers and evaluations).
Special Considerations: We decided that at least one of the winners had to be a paper submitted by the authors or one where the authors substantially engaged with The Unjournal's processes. However, this constraint did not prove binding. Early-career researchers were given a slight advantage in our consideration.
Final Selection: The first and second prizes were given to the papers with the first- and second-most points, respectively.
This comprehensive approach aimed to ensure that the prize winners were selected in a manner that was rigorous, fair, and transparent, reflecting the values and goals of The Unjournal.
Text to accompany the Impactful Research Prize discussion
Note: This section largely repeats content in our guide for researchers/authors, especially our FAQ on "why engage."
Jan. 2024: We have lightly updated this page to reflect our current systems.
We describe the nature of the work we are looking to evaluate, along with examples, in this forum post. Update 2024: This is now better characterized under "What research to target?" and "What specific areas do we cover?".
If you are interested in submitting your work for public evaluation, we are looking for research which is relevant to global priorities—especially quantitative social sciences—and impact evaluations. Work that would benefit from further feedback and evaluation is also of interest.
Your work will be evaluated using our evaluation guidelines and metrics. You can read these here before submitting.
Important Note: We are not a journal. By having your work evaluated, you will not be giving up the opportunity to have your work published in a journal. We simply operate a system that allows you to have your work independently evaluated.
If you think your work fits our criteria and would like it to be publicly evaluated, please submit your work through this form.
If you would like to submit more than one of your papers, you will need to complete a new form for each paper you submit.
By default, we would like Unjournal evaluations to be made public. We think public evaluations are generally good for authors, as explained here. However, in special circumstances and particularly for very early-career researchers, we may make exceptions.
If there is an early-career researcher on the author team, we will allow authors to "embargo" the publication of the evaluation until a later date. This date is contingent, but not indefinite. The embargo lasts until after a PhD/postdoc’s upcoming job search or until it has been published in a mainstream journal, unless:
the author(s) give(s) earlier permission for release; or
until a fixed upper limit of 14 months is reached.
If you would like to request an exception to a public evaluation, you will have the opportunity to explain your reasoning in the submission form.
The Unjournal presents an additional opportunity for evaluation of your work with an emphasis on impact.
Substantive feedback will help you improve your work—especially useful for young scholars.
Ratings can be seen as markers of credibility for your work that could help your career advancement at least at the margin, and hopefully help a great deal in the future. You also gain the opportunity to publicly respond to critiques and correct misunderstandings.
You will gain visibility and a connection to the EA/Global Priorities communities and the Open Science movement.
You can take advantage of this opportunity to gain a reputation as an ‘early adopter and innovator’ in open science.
You can win prizes: You may win a “best project prize,” which could be financial as well as reputational.
Entering into our process will make you more likely to be hired as a paid reviewer or editorial manager.
We will encourage media coverage.
If we consider your work for public evaluation, we may ask for some of the items below, although most are optional. We will aim to make this a very light touch for authors.
A link to a non-paywalled, hosted version of your work (in any format—PDFs are not necessary) that can be given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Again, we will not be "publishing" this work, just evaluating it.
A link to data and code, if possible. We will work to help you to make it accessible.
Assignment of two evaluators who will be paid to assess your work. We will likely keep their identities confidential, although this is flexible depending on the reviewer. Where it seems particularly helpful, we will facilitate a confidential channel to enable a dialogue with the authors. One person on our managing team will handle this process.
Have evaluators publicly post their evaluations (i.e., 'reviews') of your work on our platform. As noted above, we will ask them to provide feedback, thoughts, suggestions, and some quantitative ratings for the paper.
By completing the submission form, you are providing your permission for us to post the evaluations publicly unless you request an embargo.
You will have a two-week window to respond through our platform before anything is posted publicly. Your responses can also be posted publicly.
For more information on why authors may want to engage and what we may ask authors to do, please see For researchers/authors.
