Last year, Frank Swain of SciencePunk and I put a series of questions to various parties ahead of the European Election in an article that ended up creating a lot of debate, particularly in and around the Green Party.

Being slightly further ahead on the awesome science writer career path than I am, Frank is off writing books about Zombies and stuff this time around, but next week I'll be picking up with a bigger and better version for the general election - 10 questions put to every party with the results to be presented in six consecutive articles for the Guardian, culminating in a podcast at the end of the month.

The questions aren't just from me. Brian Cox, former drug policy advisor David Nutt, Petra Boyton, Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre have pitched in as well, helping me to put together a series of questions on a range of topics which cover science funding, drugs policy, GM crops, stem cell research, climate change, energy, animal testing, pharmaceutical regulation, alternative medicine, and other subjects.

Last time we did this, it was clear that asking e.g. "what is your policy on climate change" produce fairly dry policy recitals from the main parties. This time around we've changed the style somewhat, to try and come up with question that can't just be brushed off with a reference to the manifesto.

For example, rather than asking the parties what their policies on drugs are, or whether they would legalize a particular drug, we've taken a trickier approach, asking things like: what evidence, if any, would it take for you to declassify a drug? In this way, we hope to get a much better insight into the actual thinking behind the policy.

Although of course they may just recite the policy anyway. Part of the excitement in doing this is that I have genuinely no idea how the parties will react.

As well as our questions of course I'll be studying the manifestos, and looking at some of the best analysis from around the web, linking to others who have put questions to their MPs, and looking at information gathered from the amazing new Wiki project, Skeptical Voter. The aim is to end up with the most detailed single analysis of science policy ever published in a newspaper.

We've also gone wider this year. Last time we looked simply at the three main parties, the Green Party and UKIP. This time, we've spread out to include some of the regional parties, and I've included the BNP. Not all of their answers will make it into the six pieces, but we'll be putting up as much raw information as we can either on the Guardian or here.

So, stay tuned. The first piece of this huge project will, depending on the speed of replies, be going up either this Friday, or on Monday. Follow me on Twitter at @mjrobbins or subscribe to our RSS feed, and you can watch the answers as we get them up! It should be an interesting week.