How do researchers evaluate research? - The Official PLOS Blog

PLOS has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study how researchers evaluate both the credibility and impact of research outputs (e.g. articles, preprints, data, and code). We will be conducting this research in partnership with the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB).

We’ll be looking at this in two contexts: (1) when researchers are discovering and reading these outputs in the process of their own research, and (2) when they are assessing these outputs while participating in grant application review panels and hiring committees.

We are interested in characterizing the steps that researchers go through to form judgments of both credibility and impact in these two contexts.