Scientific Question Template

This is a proposed template for open scientific questions. Feel free to suggest additions/modifications.

Clarifying the question

• Non-goals for the question (that is, questions that we’re not asking)
• Try to give examples or relevant background information

Status of Question

• What stage are we in? Lit review? Do we have any running experiments?

Relevant Research

• Directly related research
• Possibly related research
• If it’s unclear if/how a certain body of research is relevant, we can start a new question of the form “is research about x relevant to question y”
• We should put only brief summaries of each body of relevant research in the main question page so that the page doesn’t get too long. But if there is a lot to write about a certain type of research, we could break that out into it’s own page and link to it from the summary.
• Each section here should include why we think the research is relevant to the top level question.
• Each section here should link to the relevant mendeley folder
• Each section may call out direct connections to other sections, but shouldn’t speculate on possible connections (that should be done in the Possible answers section)
• This section shouldn’t be doing any analysis beyond what’s needed to explain why an area of research is relevant

Relevant discussion

• Put any non-scientific discussion on the topic here that may be relevant

Possible answers to the question

• This section is speculative. As such, it can reference sections on relevant research, or not (if the speculated answer doesn’t have any relevant research).
• Proposed answers can combine/synthesize very different areas of research
• This section can also draw from non-scientific discussion from either the discussion page, or outside websites.

Related questions

• Can list related questions here and even make brief comments on them. But any significant work done on a related question should be taken into it's own page and linked to here.