David Reinstein
Economist · Founder and Co-Director of The Unjournal
I work on how research gets evaluated and used (mostly through The Unjournal), on charitable giving and effective altruism, and on research methods.
Economist · Founder and Co-Director of The Unjournal
I founded The Unjournal in 2022 and co-direct it. We commission experts to publicly evaluate and rate research in economics and quantitative social science that seems relevant to global priorities, often working papers that haven’t been through a journal. Evaluators are paid, and their evaluations and ratings are published openly, along with the authors' responses.
The aim is to make useful research more rigorous and easier for decision-makers to rely on, and to give researchers credible feedback and credit without the slow “publish or reject” cycle of traditional journals.
Through our Pivotal Questions work, we start from specific questions that matter to funders and policymakers, and focus evaluation on the research that bears most directly on them.
info.unjournal.org · Knowledge base · Read the evaluations · Pivotal Questions · More on The Unjournal
AI use: The text on this page was drafted with Claude Code in October 2026, from my CV, my existing pages and public sources, and revised over several rounds of my feedback. The work described is my own and my co-authors'. How this site uses AI