Authoritativeness flywheel: methodology paper + quarterly report + citation seeding (Move 3)

[openclaw-dv]

Context

PMF survey (2026-05-14): the win condition for SynthBench is competitors race to be listed on it, the way labs race to MLPerf. That only works if SynthBench is the citation buyers reference when asking "is this synth-respondent tool real?". Absent from the leaderboard ⇒ costs the vendor a sale.

Q4 data: 61% of buyers would shift purchase decisions on a credible 3rd-party benchmark. The credibility has to be manufactured deliberately — it doesn't accrete by itself.

Three parallel tracks

3a. Methodology paper on arXiv

• Reproducible methodology write-up
• Pinned harness version + dataset cuts
• Co-authored with at least one external research collaborator (lifts credibility above "vendor-marketing dressed as research")
• Submission target: arXiv cs.CL or cs.HC

3b. Quarterly "State of Synthetic UXR" report

• Wesley signs as author/editor
• Pulls leaderboard data + community-config submissions at end-of-quarter
• Highlights: vendor movement, notable user configs, methodology evolution
• Published on synthbench.org/findings + linked from arXiv update + sent to a curated buyer-side newsletter list

3c. Citation seeding

Target communities (rank-ordered):

• UX research subreddits (r/UXResearch, r/AIUX)
• AI-eval newsletters (TLDR AI's eval beat, Latent.Space, AI Snake Oil)
• Marketing-research-on-AI Substacks (Generally Intelligent, Garbage Day's AI vertical)
• Academic eval communities (HELM mailing list, LMSYS Discord)

Goal: ≥3 third-party citations of synthbench.org methodology in non-DataViking publications within 90 days.

Done when

• arXiv paper submitted (3a)
• At least one quarterly report published (3b)
• At least 3 third-party citations tracked (3c)

Leading indicator

Citations leading indicator above; secondary indicator is referral traffic to synthbench.org from non-DataViking domains.