Do any fields have a recognized text type analogous to a “plan”?

Question

I’m interested in if there’s any general answer to the question, “what is worthy of publishing in an academic journal”? Because I once read an interesting post by Terence Tao (“Does one need to be a genius to do mathematics”) with an insightful catalogue of ways that a person can contribute to a field. For example, they can prove a theorem, but also organize pre-existing results, communicate findings to a lay audience, or even structure future research in the form of a research program, such as the Minimalist Program or Hilbert’s Program.

In general, it’s often said that to publish academic work, even a dissertation, you have to “create knowledge”, although I wonder if there’s some debate as to what that qualifies as, and still if there are various subtle sub-types.

Anyway, the real question is, if someone has analyzed what qualifies as “academic research worthy of publishing”, I’m really curious if in any field there’s a known article or document type that sometimes recurs which is like an attempted plan for solving a problem.

For example, any political issue such as climate change. I once saw a research review article which only briefly mentioned at the end in a few sentences some suggested topics or questions that the author recommended guide research in the near future. Much research is retrospective, and descriptive, in a way. You are only collecting or documenting, and analyzing, something you did. (This is already getting at the list I would like of various knowledge-creating “actions” which apparently make the grade for publication: description - analysis - explanation - prediction - discovery - etc.) But I’ve never seen an academic journal say, “according to this scrupulous analysis by this expert, here is a highly elaborate analysis of the factors behind why we cannot reduce carbon emissions. These political aspects, these technological aspects, etc are what is currently obstructing this goal.” And then outlining an actual plan, from an expert, about how they think a goal could be achieved.

In other words, I don’t see why a plan would be any less a legitimate academic document type than other common ones.

So which field sometimes publishes texts that are something like “plans”?

Thanks very much

Answer 1

“according to this scrupulous analysis by this expert, here is a highly elaborate analysis of the factors behind why we cannot reduce carbon emissions. These political aspects, these technological aspects, etc are what is currently obstructing this goal.” And then outlining an actual plan, from an expert, about how they think a goal could be achieved.

This basically describes (part of) my job. I'm a government researcher but there are also researchers at non-governmental institutes, who do this. You are looking for a job at an institute that has a focus on policy advice. The research (with a national or EU focus) is often published as reports (instead of scientific journals). If you want peer-reviewed publications, it gets difficult. Usually, the more technical aspects (such as model descriptions etc.) can be published as a peer-reviewed paper.

Some people somehow manage to publish this stuff in journals such as Nature. But to be honest, for most of us it's not worth the effort because our main target audience is the government. And the government likes reports.

You could also contribute to meta-science organizations such as IPCC. Anyone can contribute as a reviewer and one day you might become an IPCC author.

Answer 2

Clinical trials registration is a type of published plan. https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/

In areas of physics where the experiments are very expensive, sometimes detailed plans for data collection, with predictions, are published.

Answer 3

Clinical trials (and other clinical research) protocols?

There’s a selection at https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/covidtrials related to COVID. There’s plenty more in the literature.

Answer 4

Policy-making or even policy-influencing is not the job of academia.

The academia strives to answer "what happens if ...?", not "what should we do?" - unless it applies to the process of research itself. We have other structures for that in our society. For "real-life applications", the typical thing to do is to create a committee or a panel of experts to influence policy-making. Individual expert opinions do appear in the media, and they are prominent in the academic format of (invited) reviews/surveys. The latter could get fairly close to what you are proposing, and in your example, it is largely a value judgement and a moral judgement separating the two.