Let’s see where this goes. Will it lead to less magic with numbers or more and bigger magic?
Peer review
Why has a historic medical publication gone weird?
A science writer asks, citing several distinctly odd viewpoints aired in the journal that was founded in 1823, including This year, the weirdness continued. A paper in The Lancet argued that certain food experts should be banned from food policy discussions. (Of course, the experts that should be banned are any that are associated with […]
A new wrinkle in misleading research?
So the genius of the tobacco companies’ strategy was that the research they funded was good research, just not about the effects of tobacco.
Open access: UCal severs links with Elsevier/Big Pharma loves open access
many of the people who might need the information would not have access to a university library that subscribes to expensive publications. How about people who are making decisions about cancer treatments who would like to find out if studies they have heard about were replicated?
2018 Creationist paper: Retraction notice isn’t enough for Jerry Coyne
Hmmm. To please Jerry, maybe the author will have to disappear too. 😉
Why people don’t “trust science”: The “Cancer Personality”
Some of us remember the spate of sciencey articles that appeared in women’s mags on the cancer-prone personality. It sounded wrong at the time. Many of us knew so many people who had died of cancer who didn’t fit the type at all.
Gaming the Science system: How replication can be gamed in neuroimaging
They tested that and came up with some dramatic variances. Remember that when you hear what neuroimaging supposedly shows about how people think.
Researchers: Double down on theory like “natural selection” to solve replication crisis
At Nature Human Behaviour, we are told that the replication crisis is due to lack of rigid adherence to such a theory: Science, he explains, is about accumulating sets of observations that occur reliably—the Sun appears at different places in the sky depending on the season and time of day; finches have different shaped beaks […]
Amazing! Science journal op-ed gets real about why so many people don’t “trust science”
Researcher: As a scientist and an organizer of this conference, I had walked into the planning of this meeting with my own frustrations and preconceptions about “science denial,” and how to fix it. On the day of the event I cautioned the audience that they should prepare to have their assumptions challenged, because after immersing myself in the field I had thrown all of mine away.
A science journal’s editors resign en masse over open access foot-dragging
They’ve heard lots of noise but also seen lots of foot-dragging, about making research reports available publicly for free: The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making […]
One reason some scientists choose low-quality predatory journals- government money
But always remember, doubts about science – as practiced – are always because the public is narrow and stupid, according to pundits, and doesn’t “trust science. ”
Social science hoax papers: Putting a respectable face on persecuting the hoaxers
Sexton: Similarly, the experts Singal contacted said the use of fake data still counts as data fabrication even if the dataset was obviously meant to be part of a satirical hoax. So there may be two grounds on which this IRB could decide to punish Boghossian.
Social science hoaxer’s job at risk for revealing “bias”
Boghossian’s breach of ethics was that he was supposed to get the consent of the journal editors before hoaxing them because they are human subjects. No, really. That is the explanation.
Study: “Half-life” of scientists dramatically shorter over time
The need to get a citation—any old how—may help account for peer review scandals and the need to treat fossil concepts like Darwinism as if they were still alive (why risk any kind of dissent when attrition is so high?).
Kim Kardashian’s paper one of Top Ten Science Retractions of 2018
One can’t help thinking that in at least two cases, much more must be wrong than just individual misconduct.