AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Research Design Tracking and Assessment for the Social Sciences

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

Reliable assessment of causal research designs in the social sciences is critical for evidence-based policy-making, yet has so far relied entirely on manual expert analysis. We introduce Automated Research Design Tracking and Assessment (ARDTrA), a task that involves detecting the research design used in a paper and assessing the quality of its application. We create an expert-annotated dataset of papers covering six families of counterfactual research designs and evaluate the task using a multi-turn RAG-based conversational pipeline. Across four retrieval strategies, four LLMs and six embeddi

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-21T08:32:02.028Z. This is not the publication date.