Introducing Hypothesis Descriptions

Abstract

Hypotheses play a central role in the scientific process, yet the way they are introduced often leaves much room for interpretation, which makes it difficult to use them later on: to study and test them, to delineate their scope and to explore the relationships they have to other hypotheses or concepts, to datasets, methodologies or other resources. Here, we introduce a new article type in RIO that is dedicated to them: Hypothesis Descriptions. Such articles combine a specific verbal definition of a hypothesis with a concise description of its components and provide pointers to prior work as well as alignments with formal ways of knowledge representation, optionally including relevant nanopublications. With this format, we aim to facilitate the study of hypotheses in and of themselves, to improve their testability along with the documentation and interpretability of such tests, and to stimulate efforts towards standardization and automation in this space.