Research Ideas and Outcomes :
Editorial
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Corresponding author: Daniel Mietchen (daniel.mietchen@ronininstitute.org), Jonathan M. Jeschke (jonathan.jeschke@fu-berlin.de), Tina Heger (t.heger@wzw.tum.de)
Academic editor: Yasen Mutafchiev
Received: 29 Jan 2024 | Published: 01 Feb 2024
© 2024 Daniel Mietchen, Jonathan Jeschke, Tina Heger
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Mietchen D, Jeschke JM, Heger T (2024) Introducing Hypothesis Descriptions. Research Ideas and Outcomes 10: e119805. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.10.e119805
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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.
formalized hypotheses, nanopublications, manuscript types
A hypothesis is "[a]n assumption that
Hypotheses can arise at any step in a research cycle or even beyond, e.g. while observing a phenomenon or responding to a question, while exploring theoretical approaches to a problem, while reading or writing a manuscript, patent or proposal, while designing a data acquisition workflow, while curating, interpreting or integrating data or samples, or while incorporating new bits of information into an existing body of knowledge. Traditionally, few of these steps would be published on their own, and the publications resulting from a given research process may or may not contain all the hypotheses generated, explored or otherwise entertained on the way. Besides formal publications, there are various other channels through which hypotheses might enter scholarly discourse, including lectures or personal communications. Those hypotheses that were never communicated will essentially be forgotten, though any one of them might well be conceived independently by others, some of whom might eventually communicate them.
Many ways have been used to include a hypothesis - new or otherwise - in a publication. For instance, it could be in the title, which could be explicit or less so. Apart from the title, the hypothesis might be in any part of the publication and spelled out in detail. Across multiple publications, the same hypothesis (by any measure of sameness) might be referred to by one or more names (or even none), and the structures of different hypotheses might exhibit varying degrees of similarity. While hypotheses typically originate from a limited context, much of their appeal is in the extrapolation to new contexts, and much of their usage involves the delineation of their scope as well as aggregation of insights gathered from the study of multiple hypotheses. All of this could in principle be standardized.
On that basis, some research fields have developed practices that formalize the ways in which hypotheses (or certain aspects or variants thereof) are being stated, structured, delineated in scope, tested, or referred to. For instance, in formal logic and other branches of mathematics, conjectures are mathematical statements without a known proof, while theorems are mathematical statements that have been proven, and tools like lemmas and proof assistants can help in formalizing such statements while advancing from conjectures and proven lemmas to proofs of theorems (cf.
In other fields, formalization of hypotheses takes other forms. For instance, works in biological taxonomy typically contain taxon treatments (e.g.
There are also fields in which there is less of a formal framework - if any - for expressing and handling hypotheses, which renders it more difficult to find pertinent hypotheses and work with them, including in automated fashions. This is the case, for instance, in some branches of ecology like invasion biology, where efforts are ongoing to map the landscape of existing hypotheses (
What could this look like? In short, the verbal definition of a hypothesis is translated into formulaic language, and that formalization of the hypothesis is then linked to existing knowledge by way of nanopublications annotated with standard identifiers (
For instance, one of the assertions contained in
RIO is about communicating the research process all along the research cycle (cf.
Hypothesis Description manuscripts in RIO might well become a dedicated manuscript type eventually, but as long as the hypothesis-related workflows are still being ironed out, we suggest to use the existing manuscript type for Research Idea instead, as we have done in the example described below.
Any Hypothesis Description article should only have one target hypothesis, so as to avoid ambiguity and to facilitate the study of that particular hypothesis.
In the following, we will briefly outline the structure that we propose for Hypothesis Descriptions, provide preliminary instructions and an example as well as some further contextualization.
In this section, we introduce the initial structure of a Hypothesis description. This structure is also represented in the Hypothesis Description template (
In terms of front matter (title, authors, abstract, keywords, ethics, funding etc.), Hypothesis Description manuscripts will be handled mostly like any other manuscript, the exception being that the title should be prefixed with "Hypothesis Description" (not italicized) and otherwise just contain the name of the hypothesis in question.
We propose the following sections for the body of a Hypothesis Description manuscript (mandatory ones are bolded):
The template provides instructions for each of the sections. The outlook section is optional, and for now, the machine-friendly version is too, since the workflows for that are still being developed.
To illustrate how such Hypothesis Description papers can look like in practice, we accompany this editorial with an example (
Various textual definitions of the ERH have been stated in different scientific papers over time. They all relate to this overall idea, but differ slightly in their phrasing. Listing these differing definitions in a Hypothesis Description paper (see Table 1 in
The overall idea behind the ERH in fact is a rather complex mechanism, consisting of several elements: First, the process of transportation to a new area outside of the native range could lead to the situation that some enemies are 'left behind'. This is especially likely for those enemies that are specialized on the focal species. Second, the hypothetically reduced pressure by enemies in the new range could lead to a better performance of the invader. This complexity of the idea has led to the suggestion of naming a set of sub-hypotheses for the ERH (cf.
Such a detailed definition of a hypothesis can be especially powerful when combined with the use of a controlled vocabulary, because this allows linking the used terms to definitions, while at the same time enhancing machine-actionability.
Both the listing of existing definitions and the formalized representation of hypothesis variants can enhance accuracy of scientific discussions around the respective hypothesis, and can allow a more reliable mapping of empirical evidence or experimental designs to hypothesized relationships. Likewise, meta-analyses that aggregate evidence from multipe tests would profit from such more explicit and formalized definitions, because this would decrease the likelihood of misinterpretations and wrong assignments.
Hypotheses can have a number of roles in scientific workflows. For instance, they can explain existing data or make predictions where data are missing. In principle, they can also be used to browse the scholarly literature by hypothesis (e.g. to see for which species, habitats or locations the Enemy Release Hypothesis has been tested), and a basic implementation of that is available via Scholia (
If hypotheses were properly integrated with metadata about the research questions, methods and datasets relevant to them, it would be easier to keep track of which hypotheses have been put to a test, for which ones (or which aspects or variants of them) confirmatory evidence is accumulating or lacking, and how the evidence regarding one hypothesis might affect others.
For these various roles of hypotheses, it is important that their respective scope is clearly delineated and communicated. We think that turning hypotheses into research objects in and of themselves that can be published, cited and versioned is a good step in this direction.
As is current practice for Research Ideas and other article types, Hypothesis Description manuscripts will be subject to peer review, which shall include associated nanopublications. Just like any other RIO publication, Hypothesis Description manuscripts can be updated, resulting in a new version that has its own unique identifier.
We believe that Hypothesis Description papers can have several merits. First, disclosing the different meanings of hypotheses and formalizing them as suggested above can enhance theory development. For example,
This research was supported by the VolkswagenStiftung (grant number 97 863;