The Lego approach to scientific publishing
In this interview with EuroScientist, Lawrence Rajendran explains why he created Matters, to change the way we communicate science.
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Yet more evidence for questionable research practices in Psychology
The replicability of psychological research is surprisingly low. Why? In this blog post I present new evidence showing that questionable research practices contributed to failures to replicate psyc…
Why so much science research is flawed – and what to do about it
Dodgy results are fuelling flawed policy decisions and undermining medical advances. They could even make us lose faith in science. New Scientist investigates
Cancer Research Is Broken
There’s a replication crisis in biomedicine—and no one even knows how deep it runs.
The Unintended Consequences of the New Focus on Replicating Scientific Research
The Unintended Consequences of the New Focus on Replicating Scientific Research
And how to fix them. By Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus.
Why A Culture of Preprints Developed in Physics, But Not Biology
Scientific journal policies, physics' head start with arXiv, and differences in the culture of the two disciplines may all play a role.
Universities stonewall investigations of research misconduct
Two high-profile cases in which universities — who by US law are the ones that must open an investigation into misconduct — stonewalled the effort.
How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers
By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience
A faked, retracted study of changing people's minds on gay marriage turns out to have been right
A faked, retracted study of changing people's minds on gay marriage turns out to have been right
A famous faked study gets proved right—by the people who unmasked it in the first place.
The challenges for scientific publishing, 60 years on
On the democratization of science via the Internet and the dramatic change in the communication of data and in their interpretation.
Studying the science of science
Some scientists are taking it upon themselves to go beyond their core research areas to study where the scientific system can go wrong.
It’s time for positive action on negative results
Perspectives: Structural biologist suggests that chemists can help redefine good research behavior by telling the whole story
Failure Is Moving Science Forward
The replication crisis is a sign that science is working.
Science Needs to Learn How to Fail So It Can Succeed
Social science is great at making wacky, wonderful claims about the way the world—and the human mind—works. But a lot of them are wrong.
How Journalists Can Help Hold Scientists Accountable
Amid the so-called replication crisis, could better investigative reporting be the answer? Maybe it’s time for journalists and scientists to work more closely together.
The Signal and the Noise
Once again, reproducibility is in the news. Most recently we hear that irreproducibility is irreproducible and thus everything is actually fine...
What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science
The field is currently undergoing a painful period of introspection. It will emerge stronger than before.
Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false
“Science isn’t about truth and falsity, it’s about reducing uncertainty.”
Team up with industry
Combining commercial and academic incentives and resources can improve science, argues Aled Edwards.
How many replication studies are enough?
Researchers on social media ask at what point replication efforts go from useful to wasteful.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem.
Some researchers think science should be small again.
Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’
Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests
Is Psychology’s Replication Crisis Really Overblown?
Jesse Singal argues that the critique by Gilbert et al on the Reproducibility Project isn’t as muscular as it appears at first glance.
A Whole Field of Psychology Research May Be Bunk. Scientists Should Be Terrified.
A Whole Field of Psychology Research May Be Bunk. Scientists Should Be Terrified.
An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong?
Statisticians issue warning over misuse of P-values
Policy statement aims to halt missteps in the quest for certainty: the misuse of the P value is contributing to the number of research findings that cannot be reproduced warns the American Statistical Association.
Saving science from the scientists
Is science quite as scientific as it's supposed to be? After years of covering science in the news, Alok Jha began to wonder whether science is as rigorous as it should be.
A Bayesian Perspective on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology
We revisit the results of the recent Reproducibility Project: Psychology by the Open Science Collaboration. We compute Bayes factors—a quantity that can be used to express comparative evidence for an hypothesis but also for the null hypothesis—for a large subset ( N = 72) of the original papers and their corresponding replication attempts. In our computation, we take into account the likely scenario that publication bias had distorted the originally published results. Overall, 75% of studies gave qualitatively similar results in terms of the amount of evidence provided. However, the evidence was often weak (i.e., Bayes factor < 10). The majority of the studies (64%) did not provide strong evidence for either the null or the alternative hypothesis in either the original or the replication, and no replication attempts provided strong evidence in favor of the null. In all cases where the original paper provided strong evidence but the replication did not (15%), the sample size in the replication was smaller than the original. Where the replication provided strong evidence but the original did not (10%), the replication sample size was larger. We conclude that the apparent failure of the Reproducibility Project to replicate many target effects can be adequately explained by overestimation of effect sizes (or overestimation of evidence against the null hypothesis) due to small sample sizes and publication bias in the psychological literature. We further conclude that traditional sample sizes are insufficient and that a more widespread adoption of Bayesian methods is desirable.
Psychology’s reproducibility problem is exaggerated – say psychologists
Reanalysis of last year's enormous replication study argues that there is no need to be so pessimistic.
About 40% of economics experiments fail replication survey
Compared with psychology, the replication rate "is rather good," researchers say
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