This page holds everything that was in the invitation email. If that email went to your spam folder or never arrived, nothing is missing — it is all below, and there is nothing you needed to have received in order to take part.

The framework and the evidence base are built. The remaining piece is yours: setting how much each criterion is worth relative to the others.

---

Before you start — three things that make it much easier

1. Print the Criteria Cheat Sheet in colour. This is the single biggest thing you can do to make the exercise go well. Read it through before you begin, and keep it beside you while you answer. The trade-off questions show you only the short level wording, so having the full definitions on paper is what stops you second-guessing what a level means.

2. Do about six questions, then hit "restart" as a practice run. Restarting deletes your answers, which is the point — it costs you nothing and it trains your eye. The trade-off questions take a little while to get your head around, and they get markedly easier once you have seen a few. Nearly everyone finds the first half-dozen harder than the last twenty.

3. Set aside an hour, and do it in one sitting. There is no way to save your work part way through — if you stop, you start again from the beginning. The progress bar at the top of the screen shows how far along you are. You will get somewhere between 40 and 70 questions; the number varies from person to person, because the method adapts to your answers as you go. There is no cut-off, so take as much time as you need on each one.

---

What you will be asked

You are pricing the criteria against each other. You are not scoring diseases — that work is done, and you can read every one of them in the Disease Briefs.

Each question shows you two hypothetical diseases that differ on just two criteria, and asks which should be the higher research priority. The two diseases are identical in every other respect — that assumption is doing a lot of work, so hold onto it. There are no right answers: your answers are the weights.

No preparation is needed beyond the cheat sheet. The questions are about hypothetical pathogens, not real ones.

Entering your name and email is mandatory. Your individual answers are never published and never attributed to you. The name is there for two reasons only: so non-responders can be chased, and so it is possible to look at whether producers, diagnosticians, regulators and industry weigh things differently.

---

The material

Also on this site:

The Unrankable Thirteen	The thirteen agents with too little published evidence to rank, and what is being done about them
Criteria & Levels	The full definitions, with worked examples of every level
Disease Briefs	All 158 agents — what each one is, and how it scored on every criterion, with the evidence

---

If anything goes wrong

Email e.neumann@epi-insight.com and it will get sorted out. That includes the survey misbehaving, a link not working, or simply wanting to talk through what a criterion means before you commit to an answer.

We really do appreciate the help. It is your research money being allocated, and this is a direct way to shape where it goes.

Eric and Bill