Metascience · Trackers

Trackers

Last updated 25 October 2026

Living pages that follow one development over time. Each has a question it follows, a dated timeline, where things stand, what to watch and a short reading of my own. They complement the primers, which explain concepts, and The research system, the framework that ties them together.

A New Golden Age
The US science strategy from report to practice: metascience units and funding experiments, the international push, the budget fight and every response grouped by stance.
Live · from July 2026
Metascience in Denmark
How Denmark studies and reforms its research system: DFiR, CFA, funders that test their own methods, university policy and the debates on careers and academic freedom.
Live · from January 2026
China’s Research and Innovation System
China’s strategy, governance, money, industrial policy, talent, assessment, outputs and international position, in eight strands with a timeline and the main debates.
Live · from 2023
AI in Science
How AI is changing research: researchers’ work, productivity and narrowing, validation and review, automated research, and what funders and governments are doing.
Live · from 2024
Ecosystem Forces
The external forces acting on research systems, from geopolitics and AI to funding and climate, updated weekly.
Weekly

The research system

A Whole-System Approach
Why research reform needs the whole system in view, and how experiments, new institutions and reform of established ones fit together.
Structural Problems Register
A living register of the research system’s structural problems, with evidence, Danish data, counterpoints and reforms. Updated as evidence arrives.
Why Problems Persist
Fourteen mechanisms that hold the problems in place.
Trackers are drafted with an AI agent from linked sources and reviewed by David Hilmer Rex. Suggestions for sources or new trackers are welcome: davidhilmerrex@gmail.com.