Our inclusion criteria
A researcher or study earns a place on this site by meeting all four:
- Credentials. A doctorate from a recognized institution.
- Peer review. Publication in journals indexed in PsycINFO, Scopus, or PubMed.
- Safeguards. Blinding, preregistration, or comparable methodological controls.
- Engagement. Substantive engagement with skeptical critique – not dismissal of it.
By those criteria, committed skeptics – Richard Wiseman, Chris French, Susan Blackmore, James Alcock, Ray Hyman – belong here alongside proponents like Watt, Roe, Cardeña, Tucker, Greyson, and Parnia. The question is contested; both sides are doing science.
Parapsychology was an early adopter of open-science reforms. The European Journal of Parapsychology piloted registered reports in 1976; the Koestler Unit has run a public study registry since 2012 – years before mainstream psychology embraced these tools after 2011.
What falls outside the line
None of the following appears in the field’s peer-reviewed literature, and serious researchers actively distance themselves from it:
- Ghost-hunting television and EMF-meter “investigations”
- Spirit boxes, orb photography, and similar gadget-driven claims
- Commercial mediums offering “scientific proof” of afterlife contact
- Most UFO / Bigfoot / cryptid material
- Prize-essay contests that ask for proof “beyond a reasonable doubt”
How we describe each claim
On the evidence page, every paradigm gets four angles – the claim, the best effect sizes and citations, the principal skeptical critique, and the state of replication – and a bar showing how seriously mainstream science treats the program. We try never to round a small, contested effect up to “proven,” nor a carefully studied question down to “nonsense.”
If a preregistered, multi-site, adversarially-collaborated study (N > 1,000) reported a psi effect at p < 0.001 that survived skeptical reanalysis – or if AWARE-III produced a verified case of out-of-body perception of a hidden target – we would upgrade our framing from “contested” to “evidence-supported.” That hasn’t happened yet.