BR Autoresearch

Autoresearch across neuroscience.

We are starting BR Autoresearch projects across neuroimaging, BCI, behavior, mechanisms, and intervention. Each project begins by identifying a phenomenon in existing data or a tension in the literature. We examine whether it persists under alternative measurements and analysis choices, whether it generalizes when comparable datasets exist, and whether plausible competing explanations can account for it. Researchers review the evidence and use it to refine the claim, redirect the question, or define a prospective experiment. Together, these projects will form a growing Autoresearch landscape across neuroscience.

Selected participants join the BR Autoresearch Consortium as collaborators and co-authors on the consortium paper. They help shape the question, review the analysis, and interpret what the evidence does and does not support.

Submit a proposal Explore the landscape

Over time, we also want to extend selected projects into real experiments, testing prospectively whether findings from existing data hold in newly collected data.

Explore the public campaign and its research episode archive on GitHub. Open on GitHub, opens an external site

Explore

Research landscape

Browse directions, use an editable starting question, or bring a question that is not represented yet.

Neuroimaging retains a 111-topic source index. This is a working landscape snapshot, not a real-time or complete review.

Neuroimaging and brain measurement

01What can be measured reliably across people, sessions and sites?
02Which analysis choices change the scientific conclusion, and why?
03How can measurement and experiment design improve before more data are collected?

The 111-topic source landscape remains searchable. A second layer groups the field into larger agenda directions shaped by the last decade of work on standards, reliability, scale, transport, naturalistic paradigms and causal measurement.

Field agenda

Twelve directions framing the source index

Research directions

Research direction

Open data, standards and reusable pipelines

What changed: BIDS and robust preprocessing pipelines made it possible to move datasets and analyses across laboratories without rebuilding every workflow from scratch.
What remains open: Standards still capture only part of the scientific intent, and reusable pipelines do not by themselves make analyses comparable.

Selected anchor papers

Selected examples, not an exhaustive review.

Questions BR could start from

01
What scientific information must travel with a dataset for a new analysis to remain valid?
02
Which parts of a pipeline can be standardized without erasing legitimate methodological choices?

Where BR can begin

Audit public datasets and workflows, recover missing design information, and test whether supposedly equivalent pipelines produce equivalent scientific objects.

Source index

111 neuroimaging topics

Each topic includes selected anchors and an editable starting question.

Search the source index

111 matching topics

Neuroimaging source direction

ABCD Study

Selected anchors

Data path needed

After the stated acquisition harmonization, how much scanner-manufacturer and site signal remains in matched ABCD imaging-derived measures, and does a fixed leave-manufacturer-out test preserve biological associations?

How it works

From proposal to a useful next step

Proposing researchers stay involved as the question is revised and the first exploration is reviewed.

01
Submit
Share a scientific question, why it matters, and any data that may help.
02
Refine together
Clarify the first exploration with the proposing researchers.
03
Explore
BR investigates the question and returns evidence for review.
04
Review
Check assumptions, interpretations, and unproductive directions.
05
Choose a next step
Close, reframe, or plan the next study or experiment.

Longer-term direction

From exploration to experiment.

The longer-term goal is to carry a promising lead from the research landscape into a prospective real-world experiment: decide what should be tested, record the prediction before the result is known, and learn from what happens.

That experiment might be a behavioral task or game, a BCI session, an imaging study, an animal study, or wet-lab work. It would be designed and run by collaborating researchers and laboratories, with the result returning to inform the next question.

Open call

Send the starting point.

A proposal can begin with a public dataset, data your team can access, an observation, or a scientific question. Selected proposals are refined with the proposing researchers before an episode begins.