Research Musings

Research Musings is a newsletter I write on the mechanics of research: how knowledge is made, measured, and mediated. It started as an informal but analytical space to work through the questions that don't fit a formal paper: a data slice that surprised me, a metric that doesn't mean what people think it means, an AI tool that fails in an instructive way.

Several pieces here began as Research Musings posts, and some are written with colleagues at Digital Science.

Series

The newsletter runs as a few recurring series. Data is built around a dataset, a chart, or a pattern. Metrics introduces a method or interrogates how an indicator is made and used. AI looks at the role of AI in research — tools, risks, and limits. Policy covers funding structures, research systems, and strategic shifts. Thought steps back, to institutions, incentives, and culture. Some inquiries run across several pieces; conversational bibliometrics is one such thread with its own page is here.

Selected pieces

A few that sit closest to the rest of this site:

• The AI metascientist: designing the kitchen
• Conversational bibliometrics needs a recipe, not just ingredients
• Mapping the global funding landscape: a hybrid AI classification of research funders
• From noise to signal: how to find emerging research trends in Dimensions
• From classification to consequence: define the field, change the answer
• Coherent, plausible, and wrong: input validation, sycophancy, and what LLMs skip in research design

Read Research Musings on Substack →