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Evaluation

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Meta-research and Innovation in how research is evaluated.

Meta-Research aims to identify those characteristics of research that make it most reliable, and what process of evaluation can best promote that reliability.  This can be applied to:

  • Publications, both in traditional pre-publication peer-review and post-publication peer-review, along with new approaches such as crowd sourced review or use of open science materials to examine research processes independent of the publication
  • Funding proposals, which use similar peer review methods as publication decisions
  • Researchers, in evaluating the quality of a body of published work
  • Evidence from study pooling or combination that underlie systematic reviews, medical practice guidelines, standards for biomedical research, and evidence-based policies

Innovation can help improve all types of research evaluation by developing new approaches and policies to:

  • Provide and evaluate tools to improve or augment pre- and post-publication peer-review
  • Minimize conflicts of interests, both professional and financial, that can affect the evaluation process
  • Find different models for evaluation of funding proposals, to maximize their impact and fund those most likely to produce reproducible findings
  • Apply similar methods to assess the reliability of claims and guidelines arising from pooled evidence