Platform · Research Priority Commons · not a forum

Questions patients want answered, and what each one would take.

A design for questions patients want answered, each ending in a disposition. Not built yet.

Every question here ends in a disposition — answered, not yet answerable, or closed with a reason. No voting, no threads. Comments are refinements to the question, not replies. When a question cannot be answered, the card says which data element is missing.

What exists today, and what this page is

The commons that runs is the cohort builder on the research seat — feasibility counts, a floor of five in the database, exports after an ethics verdict — and the findings library that carries group figures back to the people in them. The question commons on this page — submit, refine, disposition, deposit — is the design. No question has been submitted because there is no way to submit one. What a researcher can do today →

Lifecycle

  1. submitted
  2. refining
  3. feasible / not yet answerable
  4. claimed
  5. answered / closed

No question disappears. A graveyard would be a kind of dishonesty.

Questions

No question has been submitted — there is no way to submit one yet. When there is, every card carries its state, its plain-language reading, and a disposition.

The gap card · what is missing

When a question is not yet answerable, its card names the data element the commons lacks, why it is short — fewer than five people hold it beside the entry it would pair with — and what would change that. The question stays open and re-checks.

Closed, with the reason left visible

What a question cannot become: a treatment comparison — did one thing work better than another. The commons reports what a cohort looked like, never what a treatment did; a figure like that would be read as evidence it cannot be. Such a question is closed with this reason and left where it is. That rule holds today, in the code that publishes a finding.

Submit a question

Every question would be checked against the codebook: which data elements would answer it, and whether the commons holds five or more people with each.

Submit for feasibility checkpreview

Depositing a result — including the ones that found nothing

A null result is an answer to the question that was asked, and this field’s problem is that nulls do not get written up. A deposit here is not a publication and does not pretend to be one — it is a dated record that somebody looked and what they found.

What a deposit must carry

The question it answers
as submitted, with its refinements
The plan, timestamped before the pull
or the receipt says “no preregistration” in the same size type as everything else
A contributor line
the roles people played and how many played them — never a name
The withdrawal sentence
records withdrawn before the pull are absent; records withdrawn after it stay, and the extract says so
A re-run link
the exact query — filters, codebook version, time axis, suppression floor — under the next researcher’s own credentials
A plain-language summary
written by the researcher who ran it, because the people whose records made it possible are the ones most likely to read it

Deposited so far

None. No deposit table exists.

Four rules that make a result readable

Publication bias is this field’s oldest problem. These four decide whether a finding deposited here can be trusted, argued with, or repeated by someone who does not know you.

  1. 1

    The plan goes in before the data comes out

    designed

    A preregistration slot sits in front of every extraction: the question, the cohort definition, the outcome and the analysis, timestamped. Not a gate — you can extract without one, and the receipt then says so in the same size type as everything else. What it removes is the ability to decide afterwards which comparison you were always going to run. Amendments are allowed and visible.

  2. 2

    The people who contributed are credited

    designed

    Every deposit carries a contributor line naming the roles people played and the number who played them. Nobody is named, because nobody consented to be named. The line is required at deposit and travels into the citation. A commons built from other people’s labour that credits none of it is an extraction with better manners.

  3. 3

    Withdrawal is answered at the moment of the pull

    holds today

    Records withdrawn before an extraction are absent from it; records withdrawn after it stay in that extract and cannot be removed from an analysis already run. The rule holds today — turning research contribution off removes a record from the commons at its next refresh and from every match on the next page load, and a figure already released stays released. The sentence printed on the extraction itself is the designed half.

  4. 4

    Anyone can re-run it

    designed

    Every deposited result would carry a link that rebuilds the exact query under the second researcher’s own credentials and ethics approval, with their own receipt dated their own day. The counts will not always match, and that is the point: two receipts together say by how much the commons grew, and why.