Research Decision Journal

About

Research Decision Journal is a structured workspace for the decisions that shape your research — methodology choices, scope decisions, inclusion criteria, pivots, abandonments, collaboration choices, publication targets. Capture each decision when you make it. Months later, the journal surfaces it for review. Across many decisions and reviews, your own calibration becomes visible — and your defense ammunition becomes recorded rather than reconstructed.

WHO IT IS FOR

Doctoral students at any stage. Master's students working through a thesis. Postdocs and early-career researchers running first-author projects. Faculty preparing grant proposals or major papers. Methodology educators teaching decision discipline.

WHAT YOU CAPTURE

For each decision, the journal captures:
- The decision itself
- Alternatives genuinely considered (with reasons for rejecting each)
- Reasoning
- Assumptions in checkable form
- Evidence that would change the decision
- Expected outcome (free-text + 1–5 confidence, OR a crisp binary prediction with a deadline and a confidence percentage)
- Stakes
- Review intervals
- Optional private internal notes (never appear in any export)

13 CURATED DECISION TEMPLATES

Each template ships with scholarly grounding citing source-discipline literature (Annie Duke, Howard Marks, Richards Heuer, Michael Mauboussin) AND research-methodology literature (Maxwell, Creswell, methodologists per template):

Research design:
- Generic decision
- Choice of research question
- Choice of methodology
- Choice of theoretical framework
- Inclusion / exclusion criteria

Execution:
- Sample size and recruitment approach
- Statistical analysis approach
- Scope of investigation
- Resource allocation

Strategic:
- Abandon vs. persist
- Pivot vs. stay-the-course
- Collaboration choices
- Publication / dissemination

REVIEWS AT FIVE INTERVALS

30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and thesis-completion. Each interval has pre-authored review prompts per template. Reviews surface in the extension via an amber badge — no email, no push notifications, no calendar integration. The discipline of opening the journal is part of the practice.

CALIBRATION TRACKING — HONESTLY FRAMED

Two metrics, deterministic, no AI:
- Crisp prediction calibration is rigorous: predictions at X% confidence resolve "yes" X% of the time? Plotted as a calibration curve.
- Outcome assessment calibration is approximate. Bins your 1–5 confidence ratings against your coded match-to-expected scores. The view labels this clearly so the metric is not mistaken for rigorous calibration.

We do NOT compute decision quality. That requires substance-aware evaluation that the tool deliberately does not do.

DEFENDED-DECISIONS DOCUMENT (EXPORT)

A long-form Markdown synthesis of all your decisions — organized by category, with reviews, recurring assumptions, and an honest summary footer. Suitable for thesis methodology appendices, defense preparation, or methodological reflection chapters.

Also exports:
- Single-decision Markdown (per decision)
- Library Markdown (all decisions, summary)
- Portfolio analytics report (calibration + process discipline + distribution + recurring assumptions)
- Full JSON backup (includes internal notes for portability)

OPTIONAL EMAIL

You can optionally save your email address in settings. It powers three independent features, all off by default:
- "Email myself my pending reviews" opens your default mail client with a pre-filled draft to yourself. The extension never sends mail itself.
- Include your email as author contact in the Defended-Decisions Document export.
- Subscribe to occasional GradSummit product-update emails. This is the extension's only network call: it sends just your email address and a product tag to GradSummit — never any decision, review, or document content. Unsubscribe anytime via the link in every email.

PRIVACY

- No AI runtime. No LLM calls. No inference.
- The only network call is the optional product-updates subscribe — and only if you opt in. It sends only your email address plus a product tag, never any decision, review, or document content.
- One host permission, scoped to the single GradSummit subscribe endpoint. The extension does not run on, read, or inject into any web page.
- All decisions, reviews, settings, and internal notes live in chrome.storage.local on this device and never leave it.
- The "Internal note" field on every decision and review never appears in any export.

WHY THE PRACTICE

Decision journaling has a 30-year track record in investing (Howard Marks's memos, Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" and "Quit"), intelligence analysis (Richards Heuer's "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis"), and clinical decision-making. It has not been systematically translated into research workflow despite research being fundamentally a sequence of decisions under uncertainty. This tool is that translation.

Built by Dr. Rafiq Muhammad, PhD (GradSummit).