About SCOPE
Overview
SCOPE is an open, interdisciplinary project for the empirical study of science and academia.
The project develops reusable datasets, data-collection tools, analytical methods, reports, and public-facing visualizations concerning the organization and outputs of scientific research. Its central question is:
How effectively does the academic system transform resources—funding, talent, time, infrastructure, and public trust—into reliable knowledge and value for society?
Scientific publication has grown rapidly across many disciplines. In fields such as artificial intelligence, the cost of producing papers and written evaluations is being further reduced by generative AI. Meanwhile, peer-review capacity, researcher attention, replication effort, and institutional resources remain limited.
Growth alone does not demonstrate scientific progress, nor does it prove scientific decline. More publications may represent broader participation, new discoveries, and faster communication. They may also reflect fragmented contributions, duplicated effort, publication pressure, metric optimization, and an evaluation system struggling to process its own output.
SCOPE exists to make these questions measurable.
Rather than beginning from the assumption that academia is either healthy or broken, SCOPE aims to build the evidence needed to determine:
- what the academic system produces;
- how those outputs are evaluated and rewarded;
- which institutional incentives shape researcher behavior;
- how scientific knowledge is validated, consolidated, and reused;
- how research contributes to technology, policy, education, health, culture, and society;
- and which reforms could improve the reliability and public value of science.
Mission
SCOPE’s mission is to provide open and reproducible evidence for improving scientific institutions and research policy.
The project connects four areas:
- Science contribution — What knowledge, methods, technologies, infrastructure, and social benefits does research produce?
- Scientific organization — How do funding, careers, institutions, collaboration, peer review, and publication systems shape research?
- Research policy — How can evidence inform funding, evaluation, publishing, open-science, and academic governance policies?
- Evaluation — How should scientific quality and public value be assessed without reducing them to a small number of easily optimized metrics?
SCOPE is intended to support both research about science and practical reform of the systems through which science operates.
Initial focus and long-term direction
SCOPE ultimately concerns all scientific disciplines.
Its initial studies may focus on computer science—particularly artificial intelligence, computer architecture, AI systems, and AI software—because these fields provide important and timely case studies. They combine rapid publication growth, conference-centered evaluation, extensive public metadata, strong industrial participation, expensive computational resources, and early adoption of generative AI.
Methods developed in these initial studies should be designed for extension to other areas, including the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences.
Cross-disciplinary comparisons will be important. Academic fields differ substantially in publication culture, team size, research timescale, infrastructure requirements, review practices, and pathways to societal impact. SCOPE should avoid treating the norms of one discipline as universal.
What SCOPE is not
SCOPE is not:
- an automatic system for ranking scientists;
- a universal scientific-quality score;
- a tool for accusing individual authors or reviewers of using AI;
- an assumption that more papers necessarily mean worse science;
- an assumption that citations or economic impact fully represent scientific value;
- an advocacy project whose conclusions are determined in advance;
- a replacement for expert scientific judgment.
Its purpose is to make the academic system more observable, its trade-offs more explicit, and its policies more accountable to evidence.
Long-term vision
SCOPE aims to become a durable, open observatory of the scientific system: a shared evidence base through which researchers and the public can understand how science operates and how it might operate better.
The project’s success should not be measured by the number of datasets, dashboards, or reports it produces. It should be measured by whether those resources enable better questions, more reliable evidence, more informed public discussion, and more effective policies for science.
SCOPE seeks to help build a scientific system that rewards reliable knowledge, responsible inquiry, and lasting public value.