Why we built Nabu

A molecular biologist I spoke to described three weeks she would not get back. She was studying molecular changes during cancer progression, and the reviews all agreed: a specific class of molecules shifts as the disease develops. The claim was everywhere, tens of citations deep. So she traced the citations back to the primary data. The finding did not hold. What she had read as settled was one weak study, repeated until it sounded like consensus.

She wasn't surprised. She was tired.

She didn't just cite the consensus and move on—nobody would have blamed her. She went back to the primary data because to her, this was a load-bearing claim, not a citation formality.

Nabu is built for that instinct. It's for researchers who hold what they build on to the same standard as the work they publish.

So we built a second opinion. Nabu reads a paper the way a careful reviewer would, on its methodology, contribution, reporting, and positioning. It also provides reliability signals which can impact interpretation of the claims, and places the work on a readiness ladder running from initial observation to real-world use.

Nabu shows the reasoning for every rating, so you can judge the work yourself. No journal name, citation counts or author affiliations impact the evaluation. How we do that is on the methodology page.

We are not trying to replace peer review. We are trying to give every researcher who has stared at a stack of papers late on a Sunday the same second opinion a trusted colleague would offer. It's available to anyone, applied the same way every time.

Swapan

Founder, Nabu

WHY ‘NABU’

Nabu was the Mesopotamian god of scribes, writing, and wisdom. The patron of everyone whose job it was to get the record right. His symbol was the stylus and the clay tablet. In a culture where the written record was the institution, Nabu was the one trusted to keep it straight.

That’s the job we’ve taken on. Not deciding what science says — reading what it actually shows, and writing that down carefully.