Good
Question
Research Magnet helps experts and organisations turn promising unanswered questions into structured research briefs
Research inspiration
Does the relationship between urban green space and adolescent anxiety symptoms vary by green space quality, and is this relationship mediated by active use versus passive exposure?
Which household retrofit interventions deliver the greatest greenhouse gas emissions reduction per dollar invested in rapidly urbanising regions of the Global South?
Does peer-led financial literacy programming reduce uptake of predatory lending products among households in underserved communities?
Sample brief
What are the short- and long-term impacts of school cell phone policies on student academic achievement, behavior, and mental health outcomes?
As more than 30 U.S. states have enacted laws restricting cell phone use in K-12 schools, rigorous evidence on whether these policies improve or harm student learning, behavior, and well-being…
With near-universal smartphone access among U.S. adolescents and rapid legislative action across states, cell phone policies now affect millions of students — yet decisions are being made without robust causal…
Existing research establishes correlational links between personal device use during school and reduced academic engagement, lower test scores, and elevated anxiety and loneliness among adolescents. However, the causal evidence base…
A structured pre-proposal pipeline designed to close the gap between important questions and the researchers best placed to study them. Attribution signals the depth of support and interest from the outset.
Raise a good question
Describe the question, why it matters, how it sits within the wider research or applied landscape, and any support you can offer, from data and introductions to funding context.
Nominate a researcher
Name a researcher, team, or institution with the relevant research capability and tell them why you would like to see them focus on the question, or endorse the nominations proposed by others.
Respond to the nomination
The nominated researcher can acknowledge, decline, or reframe the question. Each accepted response becomes part of a public or private brief that can be used to develop a research proposal.
Develop the brief
AI helps surface context, related work, and useful resources. Human contributors add precision, caveats, and judgment as the brief takes shape. Public briefs can be forked and developed in parallel by different teams.
Form a team
Contributors with complementary expertise can join the effort or pursue parallel approaches. Roles, contributions, and attribution are recorded from the start and briefs are tagged to highlight where specific institutional review board or resource requirements shape the scope or approach.
Advance toward proposal
The brief becomes a research-ready question with a clearer hypothesis, supported with justification of benefit and interest and recognition for those who helped shape it or who could contribute to its impact.
Signals of interest
Research Magnet shows which questions respected people think matter, who they think should pursue them, and how those ideas gather momentum.
How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?
Schumpeter claimed that the problem of capitalism is not how capital is allocated to existing structures but how structures are created and destroyed. Systems and institutions inevitably get stale or become less effective but also work very hard to survive. Bankruptcy takes care of senescent businesses. But how do we get a sufficient replacement rate in systems and institutions that aren’t naturally subject to extinction processes?
Is it plausible to attempt to make sense of administrative law doctrine by reference to a singular organising concept or principle?
The relationship between the government and the community is complex. The variety of administrative legal structures suggests such an attempt might be reductionist.
Human science is able to make progress faster than raw experimental falsification/verification would imply, and in cases where experiments are very ambiguous. How?
The verification loop on scientific ideas is often extremely long and weirdly hostile. Ancient Athenians dismissed Aristarchus’s heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC because it would imply that the stars should shift in the sky as the Earth orbits the sun. The first successful measurement of stellar parallax was in 1838. That’s a 2,000-year verification loop.
How to navigate uncertainty in an increasingly volatile world?
We continue to live in an answer-obsessed culture, while our career paths and life trajectories are less predictable than ever. It's easy to let uncertainty paralyze us.
If life is so common in the universe, why don’t we see it?
The Great Filter is the filter that extinguishes life. When applied to humanity, it may be that the Great Filter is in front of us in time, which means we are likely to become extinct sometime in the future. However, if the Great Filter is behind us, then we may survive extinction.
What is the economic value of animal welfare?
If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last.
How can public agencies shift from current, politically driven allocations to data-driven, performance-based decision-making on capital project selections?
Transportation policy represents an avenue for improving the systems moving people, goods, and services. Evaluating the effectiveness and/or benefits of existing transportation or transportation-adjacent policies on outcomes for communities may unlock progressive insights.
How did the Wells Fargo board accept inaccurate information about the extent and systemic nature of its cross-selling practices?
We do not know how breakdowns of this magnitude occur in settings with professional board members and sophisticated reporting systems. In order to learn how to prevent them, we want to understand oversight practices relating to information flow, performance oversight and risk detection, and how they vary across companies.
How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?
Schumpeter claimed that the problem of capitalism is not how capital is allocated to existing structures but how structures are created and destroyed. Systems and institutions inevitably get stale or become less effective but also work very hard to survive. Bankruptcy takes care of senescent businesses. But how do we get a sufficient replacement rate in systems and institutions that aren’t naturally subject to extinction processes?
Is it plausible to attempt to make sense of administrative law doctrine by reference to a singular organising concept or principle?
The relationship between the government and the community is complex. The variety of administrative legal structures suggests such an attempt might be reductionist.
Human science is able to make progress faster than raw experimental falsification/verification would imply, and in cases where experiments are very ambiguous. How?
The verification loop on scientific ideas is often extremely long and weirdly hostile. Ancient Athenians dismissed Aristarchus’s heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC because it would imply that the stars should shift in the sky as the Earth orbits the sun. The first successful measurement of stellar parallax was in 1838. That’s a 2,000-year verification loop.
How to navigate uncertainty in an increasingly volatile world?
We continue to live in an answer-obsessed culture, while our career paths and life trajectories are less predictable than ever. It's easy to let uncertainty paralyze us.
If life is so common in the universe, why don’t we see it?
The Great Filter is the filter that extinguishes life. When applied to humanity, it may be that the Great Filter is in front of us in time, which means we are likely to become extinct sometime in the future. However, if the Great Filter is behind us, then we may survive extinction.
What is the economic value of animal welfare?
If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last.
How can public agencies shift from current, politically driven allocations to data-driven, performance-based decision-making on capital project selections?
Transportation policy represents an avenue for improving the systems moving people, goods, and services. Evaluating the effectiveness and/or benefits of existing transportation or transportation-adjacent policies on outcomes for communities may unlock progressive insights.
How did the Wells Fargo board accept inaccurate information about the extent and systemic nature of its cross-selling practices?
We do not know how breakdowns of this magnitude occur in settings with professional board members and sophisticated reporting systems. In order to learn how to prevent them, we want to understand oversight practices relating to information flow, performance oversight and risk detection, and how they vary across companies.
A structured way to direct important questions toward the people who are well suited to do something inspired with them.
Nominations →Before the proposal
When a question is suggested, Research Magnet uses AI and human insights to prepare a draft brief: mapping context, surfacing relevant work, flagging constraints, and making the question easier to assess by those with an interest in the field.
Broadstrokes
Identify the sources of data or narrative support for the significance of the question, the potential value of studying it, and the surrounding research or applied landscape.
Map the literature
Scan existing work to see whether the question is well explored, underexplored, ripe for replication, or pointing toward a frontier shift.
Constraint and ethics flagging
Surface methodological constraints, ethical considerations, and potential conflicts before collaboration deepens or proposal-writing begins.
Identify candidates
Highlight researchers, teams, or institutions whose expertise or position makes them plausible candidates to take the question forward.
Cluster themes
Group questions from papers, reports, interviews, and field notes into emerging themes that reveal cross-disciplinary patterns that appeal to research disciplines and interest in research.
Scaffolding
Identify potential resources from data to funding are identified.