Metascience seeks to address questions like: What contracts, incentives and institutions work best when funding scientific research? How should funders decide which projects to support? How much weight should be given to the proposal versus the track record of the proposer? How can we get the benefits of expert peer review without throttling new ideas that are outside dominant research paradigms? And how can we ensure that the most talented individuals—including early-career researchers, those entering science from non-traditional life and career paths, and more broadly members of traditionally under-represented groups—are not discouraged from pursuing science? Little systematic evidence exists on many of these questions.

The scientific method gives us the tools we need to discover answers to these questions — we just need to apply the experimental method to science itself.