The past decade has raised concerns about how research is conducted, evaluated, and disseminated. Fuelled by the replication crisis in psychology and allied disciplines, these concerns have spawned a movement that unites scholars from across the globe: the open science movement. The movement has produced and popularized a huge array of innovations to enhance the replicability of research and has even caught the notice of several large institutional actors. For example, the Biden administration declared 2023 the ‘year of open science’ in the United States. Internationally, UNESCO has collated and issued comprehensive recommendations for how member states can use and incorporate open science into policymaking. This interest has set in motion a broader movement and a dedicated academic subfield to improve how research is used in society. This movement, the meta-research movement, is the subject of this book. 

Meta-research, sometimes called meta-science, is research focused on investigating the research process itself, often aiming to make concrete improvements. These improvements have, to date, primarily focused on improving the fundamental soundness of academic research. Due to its roots in the behavioral sciences, these improvements are also often behaviorally informed. For example, the meta-research innovation called “preregistration” involves a precommitment to a particular way of analyzing data before seeing it. This innovation is designed to reduce the risks that the analyst intentionally or unintentionally changes the analysis plan after seeing how the data turns out to suit their preferred interpretation. Although this innovation focuses on the basic soundness of research, the improvements sought by meta-researchers can, in principle, involve anything – including the problem areas that are the traditional focus of the global development community, such as north-south power differences, building healthy research ecosystems, and the treatment of participants or beneficiaries.