A scientific paper reads as a clean progression from question to result. And yet, research almost never happens that way. Experiments fail, conversations redirect projects, and none of it survives into print. When the founders of a field retire, their tacit knowledge goes with them, and nothing records that it existed.

Writing in Nature Physics, a team led by the University of Pittsburgh’s Jeremy Levy and Chandralekha Singh describes the inverse seminar, or “inverseminar,” a format designed to recover some of the hidden knowledge and decisions that result in polished papers.