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Guiding Principles

Guiding principles​

Evidence before advocacy​

SCOPE is motivated by concerns about the health and public value of academia, but its analyses must remain capable of contradicting those concerns.

Studies should test competing explanations and report null or unexpected findings. Policy recommendations must follow from evidence rather than from a predetermined narrative of either progress or decline.

Open and reproducible research​

Whenever legally and ethically possible, SCOPE will release:

  • source code;
  • data schemas;
  • collection procedures;
  • frozen identifiers or datasets;
  • analytical specifications;
  • uncertainty estimates;
  • validation results;
  • robustness and sensitivity analyses.

Every important result should be traceable from its source data to its final presentation.

Measurement pluralism​

No single indicator can adequately represent scientific quality or societal value.

Paper counts, citations, venue prestige, patents, software adoption, policy references, and expert judgments each measure different things and contain different biases. SCOPE will use multiple indicators and explicitly document what each indicator can and cannot support.

Responsible use of metrics​

SCOPE will not create simplistic rankings of individual researchers or institutions.

A central concern of the project is that measurements can change behavior once they become targets. New indicators should therefore be evaluated for possible gaming, distortion, exclusion, and unintended consequences before they are proposed for policy use.

Human and contextual interpretation​

Large-scale quantitative analysis can identify patterns, but metadata alone cannot explain researcher motivations, institutional culture, or the substantive importance of a scientific contribution.

SCOPE will combine computational analysis with domain-expert evaluation, surveys, interviews, case studies, and policy analysis where appropriate.

Privacy and research ethics​

Public availability does not eliminate ethical responsibility.

SCOPE will avoid unnecessary deanonymization, individual accusations, and exposure of sensitive reviewer or researcher information. Studies involving surveys, interviews, private records, or potentially harmful individual-level inference should receive appropriate ethical review.

In particular, statistical methods for estimating AI-modified writing should not be used as infallible detectors or as grounds for accusing individual authors and reviewers.

Global and inclusive perspective​

Science is a global institution, but bibliographic databases, citation practices, language requirements, and prestige systems do not represent all researchers equally.

SCOPE will examine geographic, linguistic, institutional, disciplinary, and career-stage differences. It will treat expanded participation and improved language access as possible benefits, not merely as sources of publication growth.