Academic articles handle dense and complex subject matter, which means that a great degree of care goes into writing that tells this complicated story in a simple and compelling way. I like writing, and I thought I’d share my approach to structuring my own written work. It relies on three rules. I treat the first … [Read more…]
eLife is trying out a new model of reviewing, that includes obligatory preprints, obligatory open data and code, as well as open reviews. You can read more about it here: I was lucky enough to review an article under this new model. The openness of reviews is not yet obligatory, but I opted for it. … [Read more…]
The Oxford Reproducibility Lectures were largely concerned with trustworthiness of scientific findings, as well as carving out more robust research practices. We discussed adequately powering one’s studies, statistical methods that are better aligned to typical research questions, how to pre-register experiments, how to deal with the garden of forking paths, as well as setting standards … [Read more…]
At the beginning of my postdoc, I told my supervisor I’d like to learn some fMRI on top of my usual electrophysiology. “Wonderful”, she said, “I have just the dataset for you!” It was a straightforward research question with a fairly simple manipulation and it also happened to be along the lines of my interests. … [Read more…]
A couple of years ago, Brian Nosek and colleagues re-ran 100 psychological studies published in top journals during 2008 (source). The question was: will the results replicate? It turns out that’s a nontrivial question. Sure, you might consider that any study where the p-value fell above 0.05 is a study where the effect was not … [Read more…]
When I was an undergrad, I heard how Raymond Cattell (if memory serves me well) plastered his entire office, ceiling included, with papers on which he calculated the factor analysis involved in his theory of 16 basic personality traits. Hundreds of questionnaires with many items, maths to pull out the common variance and reduce the … [Read more…]
Scientific methods and their associated research questions form a variety of fits. Take the reproducibility crisis in behavioural psychology. In social psychology the crisis is quite prominent, with textbook findings being actively questioned. In cognitive psychology (inflated effect sizes notwithstanding) there is less of a feeling of crisis, and yet, the two fields use similar … [Read more…]
There are gasps of indignation when academics hear that pharmaceutical industry doesn’t trust academic research all that much. We think of the big pharma people as the bad guys, the conscience-free predators that prioritise profit over our health and wellbeing. Academics, on the other hand, care about the truth. They don’t aim to get rich, … [Read more…]
Discussions about scientific reproducibility are often rather bleak. We hear that our results are unreliable, that our methods are – and always have been – weak, that our ways need to change but that this might not be the best individual strategy for career advancement. And even if you want to work transparently and reproducibly, … [Read more…]
How many times have you read a research paper only to say, I don’t really believe this finding. It’s a regular occurrence, isn’t it? There is just something about the evidence that isn’t strong enough despite statistical significance, something about your theoretical knowledge that makes this finding fit rather badly. You perform a calculation in … [Read more…]