Resources
Plain answers, backed by the literature, on research quality and evaluation topics.
Why the old signals fail
Is journal impact factor a good measure of research quality?
No, impact factor scores a journal's average citation rate, not whether a specific paper in it holds up.
Do citation counts measure research quality?
No, citations measure attention, with a lag and heavy field effects, and are an error-prone proxy for merit.
Is the published literature still reliable?
Decreasingly — retractions, paper mills, and fabricated citations are rising faster than the safeguards meant to catch them.
How to evaluate a paper
How do you evaluate the quality of a research paper?
Judge the work against explicit criteria, not its journal or citation count.
Can a paper's quality be judged from the paper itself, blind to journal and citations?
Yes - the warning signs are usually in the text, and a blind read regularly disagrees with prestige in both directions.
Reliability & peer review
How reliable is peer review?
Inconsistent - independent reviewers agree only weakly, and for the strongest submissions their rankings are close to random.
Can AI evaluate research reliably?
Only when it's guided & constrained. Nabu doesn't ask a model for an opinion, it forces several models through a fixed rubric and measures their assessment on strength of evidence.