Category: Peer review
Stress: Scientist to be sentenced for trying to poison labmate
| November 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in […]
Surprise: Science thrives when people can admit they didn’t prove something
| November 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Ethics, Peer review |
For decades, researchers have complained that one of the problems that compromises research today is null findings – that is, if you don’t prove your point, you’re a failure, so you bury it (the file drawer problem). But that attitude shows poor collective reasoning skills. Showing which answers are wrong is, logically, a step on […]
What can a huge retractions database teach us?
| November 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Ethics, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
A tenfold increase in retractions around the turn of the millennium prompted action and study, including the project by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, founders of Retraction Watch, to list and study retractions. Overall, improved vigilance has slowed the trend, but key problems remain, including: A disturbingly large portion of papers—about 2%—contain “problematic” scientific images […]
Should scientists take a “Hippocratic”-style oath, to reduce dishonesty?
| October 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Peer review, Science |
Just when doctors are abandoning the Hippocratic Oath because of its restriction on killing humans, some propose that scientists adopt a version of the basic idea. Others disagree: The authors suggest that researchers sign off on a number of statements, including: I will practice and support a scientific process that is based on logic, intellectual […]
Rob Sheldon on why so many sciences seem to be devolving – not just social sciences
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Physics, Psychology |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, occasioned by the social sciences’ war on empirical fact and objectivity: — Duke University professor John Staddon’s Quillette article is particularly relevant in light of the recent 20-paper hoax on the “grievance studies” division of sociology. As John Ioannidis has observed, many areas of science are suffering from “non-reproducibility.” […]
Sokal hoaxes strike social science again!
| October 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology |
Even the most alert reader may not recall our piece on how gender theory can turn a dog’s life into a, well, dog’s life: Turns out, it may have been another Sokal hoax: Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon […]
“Severe” manipulation of figures from lab that studied gene silencing technique
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Plants, Science |
But the reason for the manipulation is unclear: A fresh investigation into publications from a French plant-biology laboratory has revealed “severe” and “intentional” manipulation of research figures. No one has yet been named as responsible for the misconduct, but the institute that led the investigation is expected to announce disciplinary measures by the end of September. […]
The Scientist tries to come to grips with the Mortarboard Mob problem
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Peer review |
We outlined the story of how a mortarboard mob hounded out of the journals a paper by a respected mathematician that had passed peer review for fear of “repercussions” (= the hell they themselves would go out and raise). The paper was about “greater variability in various traits among males than females of many species, […]
At the Guardian: The “widespread notion that academia is morally superior is ridiculous”
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science, Science, worldview issues/foundations and society |
A former biochemist and now medical writer, he has tried both the academy and industry: For the last 18 months or so I’ve been working very closely with people with different roles (medical affairs, marketing, access, etc.) of one particular company. We’ve been preparing for the launch of a new indication for their product, following a […]
Why do we think “social psychology” is science anyway?
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
More clutter building up in the inbox about the unreproducible results from social sciences: From ScienceDaily: Today, in Nature Human Behavior, a collaborative team of five laboratories published the results of 21 high-powered replications of social science experiments originally published in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious journals in science. They failed to replicate […]
Silenced! Selectivity too close to truth?
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by DLH under academic freedom, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Human evolution, Mathematics, Natural selection, Peer review, Popular culture, Probability, Science, Mathematics, Philosophy and (Natural) Theology, Society |
Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill “In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are […]
Mortarboard mob “disappears” respected mathematician
| September 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Science |
He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill […]
Enough of treating scientists like gods!
| September 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Peer review, Psychology |
That’s a big part of the problem with peer review and replication failures. Don’t believe me? Get this: In response to massive failures in so-called social sciences: “The findings reinforce the roles that two inherent intuitions play in scientific decision-making: our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data regardless of its quality or […]
Kirk Durston: Backing up the particle physicist who says there is “baked in” bias in science
| September 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Story re Sabine Hosenfelder’s comments here. In response, Kirk Durston from P2C kindly writes to say, If anyone is interested in a list of references with links, backing up the serious problem that science is facing right now, I wrote a blog post a while back that has a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of it. It currently […]
At Nature: No more excuses for non-reproducible methods
| September 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Modern technology means there is no good reason to have the problem, says a professional protocols developer: News last month brought a powerful reminder that access to detailed methods can be essential for getting experiments to work. In 2013, the US$1.6-million Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology set out to repeat key experiments from 50 high-profile cancer […]
A novel suggestion at Nature: Publish the peer reviews
| September 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
But can the internet handle all the spite and unseemliness? Another risk is the ‘weaponization’ of reviewer reports. Opponents of certain types of research (for example, on genetically modified organisms, climate change and vaccines) could take critical remarks in peer reviews out of context or mischaracterize disagreements to undermine public trust in the paper, the […]
Why, in many cases, you’d be a fool to “trust science”
| September 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
If you also think that data is a source of information, that is. And have to live in the real world. … a survey of 479 sociology professors found that only 4 per cent identified as conservative or libertarian, while 83 per cent identified as liberal or left-radical. In another survey — of psychologists this […]
Whistling cheerfully while science burns
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Here’s an entirely too self-satisfied item from The Conversation that, hard on the heels of another well-earned jab at “nutrition science,” captures one of the things that is wrong with science today: unearned self-satisfaction. Molecular biologist Merlin Crossly tells us that we should trust name journals, peer review, and impact factors. Are we to believe […]
Another well-earned jab at “nutrition science”
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Alex Berezow sticks another fork in nutrition science, courtesy John Ioannidis: Dr. Ioannidis has gone on to show that the best scientists don’t always get funded, why neuroscience is unreliable, why most clinical research is useless, and that most economics studies are exaggerated. In other words, the process by which we acquire new knowledge is […]
How Unpaywall is opening up science
| August 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
In 2011, “de-roomed” computer scientists developed a way to open up access to journal papers: After being kicked out of a hotel conference room where they had participated in a three-day open-science workshop and hackathon, a group of computer scientists simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian Parra worked […]
