Chemistry
Chemistry research, evaluated by chemists
Chemistry keeps its proof in the supporting information — and much of its best work in patents and process reports. The founding cohort will evaluate both, against the draft standard below.
What counts as evidence of chemistry skill
In chemistry the supporting information is the real paper. Full characterization — NMR spectra, mass spectrometry, elemental analysis, crystallography where it exists — is what separates a synthesis that happened from a synthesis that is claimed. An evaluator can read skill directly from how a chemist documents their compounds.
A large share of the field's strongest work never reaches journals at all. Patents are industrial chemistry's literature, and process reports record the unglamorous judgment of scale-up — solvent choice, exotherm management, impurity fate. A route that survives contact with a pilot plant is evidence of a kind that bench-scale elegance cannot fake.
Safety candor is evidence too. A chemist who documents hazards honestly, reports the run that went wrong, and writes procedures a stranger could repeat without harm is showing exactly the judgment that distinguishes research skill from luck.
Computational chemistry leaves its own trail: methods benchmarked against experiment with honest error bars, structures deposited alongside the inputs to rerun them. And across every subfield, a chemist's review record — spotting an impossible yield, a mis-assigned spectrum, an overworked catalytic cycle — shows the exact reading skill evaluation requires. The question is the same whether the artifact is a journal SI, a patent example, or an internal report: does the data shown actually support the molecule claimed.
The chemistry evaluation rubric, first draft
In chemistry the supporting information is where the truth lives, so this rubric reads characterization data the way a demanding referee should.
- Characterization completeness
- Every claimed compound is supported by data adequate to identify it, and spectra are shown rather than summarized. Gaps are declared, not papered over.
- Route judgment
- Step count, atom economy, and reagent choice reflect deliberate trade-offs, and the route's claimed advantages are stated honestly against alternatives.
- Procedural reproducibility
- A competent chemist could repeat the work from the text alone: quantities, equivalents, temperatures, workups, and yields reported without ambiguity.
- Hazard candor
- Risks are identified and handled explicitly, including the failures. Safety writing that hides problems is treated as a rigor failure, not a formality.
Founding chemistry evaluators will test this draft against published SI sections and industrial process reports alike.
What founding chemistry evaluators will do
Interrogate the rubric with real artifacts: a supporting-information section, a patent family, a process-development report — the standard must score all three without contortion.
Score public syntheses and characterization packages independently, then compare where experienced chemists diverge, so early scores carry a known spread.
Build the discipline's first calibration records, which will anchor how chemistry evaluations are weighted when the community opens.
Who this is for
The cohort needs chemists who already treat characterization data as the text, not the appendix:
- Synthetic chemists who read supporting information before they read abstracts.
- Process and medicinal chemists whose best decisions are recorded in reports and patents, not papers.
- Analytical chemists who can tell clean characterization from a wishful baseline.
- Materials chemists whose evidence spans synthesis, characterization, and device data.
Who this is not for
Also true, and better said before you apply than after:
- Anyone looking to certify their own compounds or routes — evaluation here points outward, at other people's artifacts.
- Chemists who want recognition on a faster clock than a public standard allows.
- Anyone who would rather their scoring record stay private; measured calibration is the design.
- Anyone expecting live evaluation queues today — the mechanics are still being designed, deliberately in the open.
Apply to evaluate chemistry
Chemistry is pre-selected on the application. Link an ORCID profile, a patent list, or characterization work we can read.