Ideometrics: a scientific approach to generating, evaluating, and prioritising ideas

Future progress will make ideometrics increasingly quantitative, digital, testable and replicable. We therefore foresee assessments of scientific footprints of each of the >70 methodological approaches, developing formal reporting guidelines to standardise ideometrics studies and allow meta-analyses, and conducting empirical comparisons between methods used to address the same challenges. Ideometrics represents an attempt to systematically unify the scientific approaches to generating, evaluating, and prioritising ideas. Its practical application should address scarcity by assisting individuals, institutions, and societies to focus their limited time, energy, capacity and resources on pursuing the ideas most that are likely to achieve their stated aims, based on an objective and scientific approach, rather than subjective and intuitive priority setting.