How Empirica earns the right to grade

Who decides whether a piece of research passes? What expertise and accountability do they bring?

An autonomous validation pipeline running against a fixed, public rubric. Three independent checks — empirical-citation verification, logic, and depth — each handled by a separate pass, then a final decision. The same pipeline scores our own internal output as scores external submissions, and every score comes with a per-check breakdown so submitters see exactly what triggered each component. No human reviewer sits in the autonomous archive's publish loop, by design — the bar is reproducible and the rubric is identical for every submission. (Bespoke client reports are the other pipeline — founder-curated and human quality-checked; see “Two pipelines” above.)

Does the rating body have a financial stake in the outcome? Do reviewers have ties to the work being rated?

We don't accept payment from authors, institutions, or publishers in exchange for a grade — past, present, or future. Submission is free; the score is the score. Revenue comes from subscriptions, bespoke reports, grant-support engagements, and research-stack builds — never from the rating itself. The validator agents have no awareness of who the submitter is at scoring time — name and email are stored on the record but not in the prompt.

Is there a defined process for identifying and evaluating the underlying evidence base?

Each submission is checked against the paper list it cites. We query OpenAlex and arXiv for citation metadata. Every [P1]..[PN] reference must match an abstract we can retrieve; any [Author YEAR] citation outside that list is treated as a fabrication. The process is identical across submissions of the same content type, and the queries are logged.

Is the underlying evidence assessed for strength, not just presence?

The Empirical Check evaluates not whether sources are cited but whether they actually support the claims made. Citations that overstate or misrepresent what the cited abstract says are flagged; specific factual claims contradicted by the source are hard-failed. We assess evidence strength qualitatively per claim, not in aggregate.

Are the criteria, the process, and the per-result reasoning public and inspectable?

The full rubric lives at /rankings/scoring. The tier ladder lives at /stars. Every scored submission gets a per-check breakdown (logic, empirical, depth) shown on its status page and emailed to the submitter, naming specific claims, citations, and reasoning steps that lowered the score. Nothing about the process is private.

Are the value judgements embedded in the rating made explicit? Is the same standard applied across cases?

The rubric encodes specific value judgements (citation rigour over rhetorical force, falsifiability over confidence, qualified hedging over bold claim) and those judgements are spelled out in the public scoring page. The rubric is the same for every submission within a content type; the only branching is academic-note vs industry-publication, with different pass floors per check, both publicly documented.

Beyond a score, is there guidance on what to do with the rated work — where it applies, what to read next, where it sits in the field?

Partial. Today the per-rubric breakdown tells a reader where a paper's strengths are (e.g. strong empirical, weaker depth). What's missing is recommendation surface — "given this paper, here are three adjacent pieces that build on it" — currently in design as the next feature. Guideline Paths and the recommendation engine are the deliberate roadmap here.

Are the results accessible to a non-specialist reader? Is jargon kept down? Are the most useful signals up front?

Two layers: the precise 0–100 score for readers who want the underlying number, and the Empirica Stars tier (zero to three) for readers scanning at speed. Per-rubric breakdowns use plain language naming specific claims, not jargon. Where coverage is thin in a field, the breakdown is the primary signal — comparative anchors ("this paper scored 87; the median in this domain scored 73") are on the roadmap.