Scientific Brainstorming

Purpose and boundaries

Use this skill to create, organize, challenge, and transparently prioritize candidate research directions. Treat every output as a proposal, not a finding. Creativity methods can alter participation and idea yield, but no method universally improves originality, usefulness, or scientific validity. The evidence base and its limits are summarized in references/sources.md.

Keep these activities separate:

• Ideation creates questions, mechanisms, alternatives, or study concepts.
• Evidence assessment checks what reliable literature and data support.
• Hypothesis validation requires observations, predictions, suitable designs, analyses, and independent scrutiny; brainstorming cannot validate a hypothesis.
• Ethics, biosafety, dual-use, regulatory, and institutional review require the relevant authorized reviewers. A brainstorm is never approval.
• Clinical advice requires qualified clinicians and patient-specific context. Do not turn research ideas into diagnosis or treatment guidance.

For an observation-led testable hypothesis, hand off to hypothesis-generation. For study architecture, use experimental-design; for sample size, statistical-power; for existing evidence, literature-review; and for analysis, statistical-analysis.

Operating rules

1. Label claims as idea, assumption, prediction, located evidence, or decision. Never blur these categories.
2. Generate independently before exposing participants to other people's or AI-generated ideas. Face-to-face turn-taking can block production, and examples can anchor later output.
3. Preserve minority views, negative evidence, uncertainty, and abstentions. Consensus is not truth and vote counts are not effect sizes.
4. Record provenance without exposing confidential, personal, controlled, or unpublished information.
5. Define evaluation criteria and directions before scoring. Keep raw ratings, reasons, ranges, and disagreement visible.
6. Search the literature after an initial independent round when practical, then deliberately reopen ideation. This reduces early anchoring without mistaking an incomplete search for a research gap.
7. Do not automatically select a “winner.” Scores are traceable decision aids; qualitative judgment, uncertainty, feasibility, and ethics gates remain controlling.

Reproducible workflow

1. Scope the session

Write one focal question and record:

• purpose, audience, decision owner, and time horizon;
• in-scope and out-of-scope topics;
• constraints that are real, assumed, negotiable, or unknown;
• current knowledge, unresolved observations, and prohibited outputs;
• whether human participants, animals, clinical care, sensitive data, pathogens, controlled technologies, or environmental release could be implicated.

If the request seeks patient-specific care, evasion of oversight, harmful optimization, or operationally enabling dual-use details, stop ideation and route to the appropriate professional or institutional process.

2. Diversify perspectives deliberately

Invite relevant methodological, domain, implementation, statistical, safety, ethics, stakeholder, and lived-experience perspectives. Diversity is not a guarantee of creativity: explain whose perspective is represented, missing, or structurally disadvantaged. Use accessible participation modes and pseudonymous participant IDs where appropriate.

The facilitator should disclose conflicts, avoid offering a preferred answer first, prevent senior members from dominating, and ask leaders to contribute after the independent round.

3. Generate independently

Give everyone the same neutral prompt, constraints, and fixed time window. Participants write ideas privately and in parallel before discussion. For each idea, capture:

• a stable ID and one-sentence statement;
• contributor ID(s) and stage (independent, discussion, or post-check);
• origin (human, AI-assisted, literature-inspired, mixed, or other);
• assumptions, predicted observations, uncertainties, and possible disconfirming evidence;
• source identifiers for literature-inspired ideas and tool/purpose disclosure for AI assistance.

Do not show example solutions before this round unless examples are necessary; if they are, record them as potential anchors.

4. Share without immediate evaluation

Use round-robin or pooled silent sharing. Clarify wording without advocacy. Permit a private or anonymous channel. Ask each participant what is missing, what contradicts the dominant framing, and which idea became less obvious after hearing the group.

5. Cluster structurally

Group ideas by an explicit relation such as shared outcome, mechanism, population, scale, or method. Keep original IDs and text. Record merges and splits. Similar wording is not proof of semantic equivalence; retain distinct ideas when their assumptions, intervention, population, or predictions differ. See references/facilitation_workflows.md.

6. Define transparent criteria

Before rating, define each criterion, direction, scale anchors, evidence needed, conflicts, and explicit weights. Common dimensions include:

• potential information gain and discriminating predictions;
• relevance to the scoped question;
• originality relative to the checked literature, not merely to the room;
• feasibility, resources, and reversibility;
• methodological rigor and vulnerability to bias;
• ethics, safety, equity, dual-use, and regulatory burden;
• value if the result is null or contradicts the favored mechanism.

Use ranges or confidence labels where assessors are uncertain. Do not hide vetoes inside an averaged score. See references/idea_evaluation.md.

7. Run adversarial review

Assign a reviewer who did not originate each shortlisted idea. Ask:

• What observation would make this idea wrong or uninformative?
• Which alternative explanation fits the same predicted result?
• What hidden dependency, measurement failure, confounder, or selection effect could dominate?
• Are authority, anchoring, group loyalty, publication incentives, or an attractive technology driving preference?
• Could this cause harm, worsen inequity, expose sensitive information, or enable misuse?

Record the response, mitigation, residual uncertainty, and whether the idea was revised—not just pass/fail.

8. Check literature and evidence

Search authoritative databases, primary studies, methods guidance, negative results, and adjacent fields. Verify every citation at its source. For each idea, record query/date, sources screened, evidence for and against, and search limits. Use statuses such as not-checked, search-incomplete, support-located, challenge-located, or mixed.

Absence from a bounded search does not establish novelty, and supportive literature does not validate a new mechanism. Reopen one short independent generation round after the evidence check.

9. Apply feasibility, rigor, and ethics gates

Before advancing an idea, identify the appropriate domain review:

• For biomedical work, consider rigor of prior research, robust design, relevant biological variables, and resource authentication. When NIH policy applies, sex as a biological variable should be considered from the research question through design, analysis, and reporting; justify a single-sex scope with relevant evidence.
• Route human-subjects, animal, biosafety, data-governance, export-control, clinical, environmental, and other regulated work to the relevant office.
• Screen life-science and enabling-technology ideas for dual-use or misuse potential early. The U.S. High-Risk Life Sciences Policy issued 20 July 2026 replaces the 2024 DURC/PEPP policy; consult the institution and current agency implementation rather than reusing the old checklist.
• Do not upload sensitive, unpublished, proprietary, controlled, or personal information to an external AI service.

An ethics or feasibility concern may require redesign, controlled handling, or stopping. A high creativity score never overrides a gate.

10. Decide and log

The accountable human decision owner records:

• candidates considered and criteria/weights used;
• raw ratings, uncertainty ranges, dissent, abstentions, and sensitivity results;
• literature and review dates;
• gate outcomes and required approvals;
• decision, rationale, rejected alternatives, unresolved risks, owner, and revisit trigger.

Label the next action correctly: further search, consultation, simulation, pilot design, protocol development, preregistration, or no action. If a confirmatory study is planned, preregister hypotheses and analysis decisions before outcomes are known; report later deviations and exploratory work transparently. Preregistration improves transparency but is not peer review, ethical approval, or proof of validity. For ideas generated after inspecting an existing dataset, record which outcomes and analyses were already seen. Treat tests on those same observations as exploratory; specify new data or an untouched holdout for a later confirmatory test rather than retroactively calling the brainstorm preregistered. See COS guidance on existing data.

Bias and failure controls

• Production blocking: private parallel generation before oral discussion.
• Anchoring and design fixation: no leader answer or AI examples until the independent round; reopen generation after evidence review.
• Authority and status effects: leader-last sharing, anonymous input, independent ratings, and visible dissent.
• Groupthink: assign a genuine alternative-generation role, invite outside review, and document rejected options. Treat “groupthink” as a family of risks, not a single universally established diagnosis.
• Evaluation apprehension: separate contribution from attribution where possible; critique ideas, not contributors.
• Premature convergence: fixed divergence window followed by an explicit transition and predeclared criteria.
• False precision: use anchored scales, uncertainty ranges, sensitivity analysis, and narrative review.
• Research-gap inflation: record search boundaries and use “no direct evidence located,” not “never studied.”
• AI hallucination or homogenization: human-first ideation, provenance, independent verification, multiple non-AI perspectives, and comparison for suspiciously repeated frames. See references/responsible_ai.md.

Optional local CLIs

The scripts are deterministic, standard-library utilities. They do not call a network service, LLM, or scientific database and do not make scientific conclusions.

python scripts/session_scaffold.py --help
python scripts/validate_register.py --help
python scripts/evaluate_matrix.py --help

Create a session register:

python scripts/session_scaffold.py \
  --session-id "microbiome-01" \
  --title "Microbiome mechanism ideation" \
  --question "Which mechanisms could explain the scoped observation?" \
  --participant P01 --participant P02 \
  --output session.json

Validate structure and provenance:

python scripts/validate_register.py session.json --output validation.json

Calculate a fully disclosed weighted matrix from CSV, including score intervals and one-at-a-time weight sensitivity:

python scripts/evaluate_matrix.py scores.csv \
  --config criteria.json \
  --weight-delta 0.10 \
  --output matrix.json

Outputs refuse symlinks and existing files unless --force is explicit; inputs and collection sizes are bounded. The validator checks structure, not truth. Its checked sections are session identity, ideas, assumptions, clusters, and decision references; it does not validate every review or governance record. The matrix flags missing bounds as unassessed uncertainty, preserves qualitative review, and leaves decision null. Its 0–100 per-idea scores and input bounds are neither criterion averages nor confidence intervals. Input formats and interpretation are documented in references/idea_evaluation.md.

Reference index

• references/brainstorming_methods.md — evidence-calibrated method selection, nominal groups, Delphi, structured elicitation, and creative prompts.
• references/facilitation_workflows.md — ready-to-run individual, group, and asynchronous session protocols plus provenance templates.
• references/idea_evaluation.md — criteria, scoring formula, uncertainty, sensitivity analysis, gates, and decision logs.
• references/responsible_ai.md — accountable AI assistance, confidentiality, hallucination, homogenization, disclosure, dual-use, and integrity.
• references/sources.md — dated primary studies and official guidance consulted for this version.