Prepared for conversations with researchers and with SAGE
Eight open-access SAGE papers as discourse graphs
Two papers from each of SAGE’s four disciplines, all published CC BY, each drawn from its full text as a question, a hypothesis, the experiments that addressed it, the results they produced and the edge each result earns. Every result names where in the paper it comes from. Each paper now has its own page, and on each page every open issue the paper leaves behind carries a proposed experiment for closing it.
How to read these graphs
A discourse graph breaks a piece of research into typed one-sentence nodes and draws how they bear on one another. The grammar is that of Discourse Graphs (Chan and Akamatsu). Read each graph left to right: a question, the experiments that addressed it, the results they produced, and the hypothesis every result is drawn against.
- QUE Question
- What the work set out to answer.
- HYP Hypothesis
- The answer the authors expected. Every result earns one edge against it.
- EXP Experiment
- One attempt at the question: a trial arm, an assay, a survey, an analysis.
- RES Result
- One finding from an experiment, with where in the source it comes from.
- ISS Issue
- An open question or untried branch the work leaves for someone else.
- addresses
- An experiment addresses the question.
- produces
- An experiment produces a result.
- supports
- A positive result that backs the hypothesis.
- opposes
- A negative result that counts as evidence against the hypothesis, or a refutation of an earlier claim.
- informs
- A partial or mixed result that bears on the hypothesis without settling it.
- consistent with
- A negative or inconclusive result that does not count either way: no positive control passed, or there is no sensitivity or power statement, so the absence of an effect cannot be told from a measurement that failed.
- relation
- A thin dotted line: a link the source itself states between two experiments, such as one being derived from another.
A dashed box marks a result the rule above counts as uninformative, or an issue. In the drawing, click a node to jump to its text below.
The eight
| Discipline | Paper | Journal | Cited by | Experiments proposed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health Sciences | Psilocybin for depression and anxiety in cancer Griffiths et al. 2016, Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized double-blind trial. 10.1177/0269881116675513 | Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016 | 2,188 | 4 |
| Teriflunomide versus interferon beta-1a (TENERE) Vermersch et al. 2014, Teriflunomide versus subcutaneous interferon beta-1a in patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis: a randomised, controlled phase 3 trial (TENERE). 10.1177/1352458513507821 | Multiple Sclerosis Journal, 2014 | 354 | 4 | |
| Life & Biomedical Sciences | Camouflaging in autistic men and women Lai et al. 2017, Quantifying and exploring camouflaging in men and women with autism. 10.1177/1362361316671012 | Autism, 2017 | 701 | 4 |
| Microglia depletion after brain ischaemia Jin et al. 2017, Depletion of microglia exacerbates postischemic inflammation and brain injury. 10.1177/0271678X17694185 | Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, 2017 | 350 | 4 | |
| Materials Sciences & Engineering | Tyre and rider effects on bicycle stability Bulsink et al. 2015, The effect of tyre and rider properties on the stability of a bicycle. 10.1177/1687814015622596 | Advances in Mechanical Engineering, 2015 | 275 | 4 |
| Fatigue rate in the heterogeneous region of a welded joint Zhang et al. 2016, Effects of heterogeneity and load amplitude on fatigue rate prediction of a welded joint. 10.1177/1687814016663964 | Advances in Mechanical Engineering, 2016 | 160 | 3 | |
| Social Sciences & Humanities | A new model of social class from the Great British Class Survey Savage et al. 2013, A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. 10.1177/0038038513481128 | Sociology, 2013 | 1,300 | 4 |
| Is kindergarten the new first grade? Bassok, Latham & Rorem 2016, Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?. 10.1177/2332858415616358 | AERA Open, 2016 | 580 | 4 |
How the eight were chosen
Open access first, so the whole paper can be read by a machine and so a graph of it can be published rather than only shown: every paper here is CC BY on journals.sagepub.com. Within that, the most-cited empirical paper in each discipline, by forward citations (works citing the paper, OpenAlex, 17 October 2026), skipping reviews, methods papers, scales and guidelines, which dominate the top of every list and have no hypothesis for a result to bear on. Three full texts came from Europe PMC, five from SAGE’s own HTML. The paywalled shortlist that preceded this one, with the two pairs kept below, is in the written brief.
What the proposed experiments are
An ISS node is the only node in a discourse graph that states something nobody has answered: an open question, an untried branch, or a next step the authors named. On each paper’s page, opening one of those issues shows an experiment designed to close it, with a control, a sensitivity statement, what the result would count as, and what the literature has already settled. Under each design is a place to say what is wrong with it.
They are machine proposals. The published evidence on machine-designed experiments is that they read as novel and score worse on feasibility than designs by people in the field, so these are offered for criticism rather than as findings. The criticism is the useful part: it is what would make the next ones better, and it is why each design ends with questions rather than conclusions. Nothing on these pages is a Negative-Results Record, and no design is one either.
Two pairs from paywalled papers
Drawn from abstracts, because SAGE’s site does not serve these full texts to a machine. They are kept because each shows a claim and the later SAGE paper that tested it, in one picture. No experiment is proposed for either.
- OnabotulinumtoxinA for chronic migraine: the PREEMPT pair
Health Sciences · a pair · bronze open access, not CC BY - Power posing and its re-test
Social Sciences & Humanities · a pair · closed access
Licence and what this is
The eight full-text graphs are drawn from CC BY papers and are published here with attribution, exactly as the pilot’s records are; each links to the paper it was read from. The two pairs are drawn from the abstracts of papers that are not open access. The proposal is the same for all ten: SAGE could authorise graphs of its own papers, drawn into the fields a Negative-Results Record already holds, and these are what the first ones would look like.
Method: OpenAlex, SAGE publisher lineage, article type, CC BY and gold or hybrid open access, sorted by cited_by_count per domain and per field, screened by DOI prefix and title; full texts from Europe PMC XML or the SAGE HTML; one extraction pass per paper following a written brief, each finding with a locator and a quote; the JSON for each graph is kept with the brief. The experiment designs follow a second written brief and name their own grounding, their prior-art search and what they could not derive. The extraction notes on each page say what was inferred.