As the scientific enterprise has grown in size and diversity, we need empirical evidence on the research process to test and apply interventions that make it more efficient and its results more reliable. Meta-research is an evolving scientific discipline that aims to evaluate and improve research practices. It includes thematic areas of methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives (how to do, report, verify, correct, and reward science). Much work is already done in this growing field, but efforts to-date are fragmented. We provide a map of ongoing efforts and discuss plans for connecting the multiple meta-research efforts across science worldwide. Throughout the history of science, leading scientists have endeavoured to theorize and conduct research on fundamental aspects of the scientific method and to identify ways to implement it most efficiently. While focused subject matter questions and discoveries attract attention and accolades, the machinery of science relies greatly on progressive refinement of methods and improvement of theory verification processes. The large majority of the most used articles across science are about methodology [1] , and many scientific prizes are awarded for the development of techniques (e.g., Nobel prizes for PCR and MRI). Studying the scientific method in itself empirically is thus a topic of great potential value. Even though the scientific method has solid theoretical foundations and a long track record of successes, it is a continuing challenge to know how its basic principles ("systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses", according to the Oxford English Dictionary) should be applied optimally in ways that can lead to faster, better, more accurate, and ultimately more useful results. In biomedical research in particular, lives can depend on the efficiency with which reliable evidence is generated and used. This challenge is increasing, in parallel with the clear success of the scientific enterprise, which has grown in both size and diversity. Several million new research papers are published annually, and the number of publishing authors in 1996-2011 exceeded, according to one estimate, 15 million [2] . Across biomedicine, the number of articles published is increasing, and the acceleration is becoming more prominent over time, e.g., Pubmed has indexed (as of July 6,
Also, Ioannidis et al. REF categorized the meta-research discipline into five main thematic fields corresponding to how to conduct, report, verify, correct and reward science.
Meta-research: Evaluation and Improvement of Research Methods and Practices
PLoS biology
PLoS biology
Biology Medicine