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What is a good source that will help me evaluate the merits of donating to scientific research vs., say, the merits of donating to global poverty and disease alleviation?
Before thinking about how to best donate to research, I'd generally want to know about the merits of research donation in general.
My priors say research is important and underfunded to a degree comparable with how global poverty alleviation is important and underfunded, but how to quantify which is more important?
That's the kind of question that the Open Philanthropy Project is trying to answer. For example, here Givewell co-director Holden Karnofsky a back-of-the-envelope calculation for DALYs created by life sciences research. Here is a similar back-of-the-envelope question for AI risks research, from former SIAI (now CFAR) staff member Anna Salamon. You might try putting numbers from these calculations in to a spreadsheet or Instacalc to get a rough idea of how the outputs change given different assumed inputs. Previous LW posts on Fermi estimates: 1, 2.