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Newsletter #4 - Q3 2026

The Metascience Observatory

Newsletter #4 - Q3 2026

The Metascience Observatory embarks on an ambitious program to audit the scientific literature using AI equipped with forensic metascience tools

This is the Substack version of our newsletter email. To subscribe to the non-Substack version, sign-up here.

Updates:

  • We are now setting up a screening pipeline to audit the scientific literature at scale and surface important major issues that need attention. We will also be releasing and distributing validated tools that will enable others to use their AI subscriptions to perform detailed audits on scientific research outputs including text, images, and data. Read more on our website about our forensic metascience work.

  • On September 18th - 20th Dan attended a workshop on AI for Research Integrity in Montreal that was run by the Center for Open Science and funded by Coefficient Giving’s Abundance and Growth Fund.

  • After meeting with Lukas Wallrich and Flavio Azevedo from FORRT at the workshop, we decided to merge the Metascience Observatory’s replications dataset in with their FReD and FLoRA datasets (almost all will port into FLoRA). Discussions on how to do this are underway. One benefit is the replications will be visible in FORRT’s new browser extension. Our website will remain as a frontend for exploring the dataset. Ingestion work will continue in some form, but we’ll be working with FORRT to deduplicate our efforts moving forward.

  • On Sept 29th Dan spoke at FORRT’s AI in Metascience 2026 online conference. You can watch a recording of my talk on YouTube.

  • Dan will be speaking in DC November 9th. The talk is at Ncholas Wagner’s DC Industrial Policy Salon and is entitled “Forensic Metascience for Policymakers: How AI Can Clean Up the Scientific Record.” RSVP on Luma.

  • Dan will be attending the Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend Nov 13 - 15 and I hope to run an unconference session there on forensic metascience (aka “sleuthing”) and how people can do their own sleuthing using our open source toolset. This event is going to be very special since it’s the Foresight Institute’s 40th anniversary!

  • Dan published a new Bird’s Eye Review on lithium and weight gain (this is a response to a largely debunked hypothesis that lithium in America’s food and water supply is a major contributor to America’s obesity crisis.) The Long COVID review has been updated with new literature.

The Metascience Observatory has entered into several productive partnerships:

  • We’re working closely with Derik Kaufman on scaling our forensic metascience and AI paper auditing work.

  • We’re working with Valentin Rodionov from Intellicat, helping evaluate their Content Credibility Index and Data and Observations Risk Index.

  • As mentioned, we’ve entered into a collaboration with FORRT to merge our replications datasets and deduplicate work going forward.

  • We are talking to Shahar Oriel about using our replications dataset to train state-of-the art replication prediction models.

Notable metascience news:

Funding is critical for us to continue to be able to pursue neglected metascience work -- if you like the work we’re doing please consider donating via Paypal or on Manifund.

© 2026 Dan Elton
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104