Category: Peer review
Still Marchin’, Marchin’ 2018 …
| April 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: TS: Do you think last year’s march, or other activism associated with it, have yielded results? RH: Some. The biggest effect was that scientists reminded themselves and each other that this is appropriate to do, that it’s important to do. I think many of the marchers last year were […]
“Opaque research” has some astronomers concerned.
| April 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, Peer review |
From Sarah Wild at Physics Today: Irreproducibility and the black box nature of machine learning plague many fields of science, from Earth observation to drug discovery. But astronomy represents a notable case study because the quantity of data is burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. The installation of new data-churning telescopes, combined with marked improvements in […]
P threshold values often likely false?
| April 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Peer review |
From John Ioannidis at the Journal of the American Medical Association: vPalues and accompanying methods of statistical significance testing are creating challenges in biomedical science and other disciplines. The vast majority (96%) of articles that report P values in the abstract, full text, or both include some values of .05 or less. However, many of […]
Abandoning statistical significance in science
| March 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, Christian Robert, Jennifer L. Tackett (22 Sep 2017) at arXiv.org: Abandon Statistical Significance In science publishing and many areas of research, the status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold and only […]
At PNAS: Reproducibility problems in science are slammed as fake news
| March 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Science |
From Daniel Fanelli at PNAS: Ultimately, the debate over the existence of a reproducibility crisis should have been closed by recent large-scale assessments of reproducibility. Their results, however, are either reassuring or inconclusive. A “Many labs” project reported that 10 of 13 studies taken from the psychological literature had been consistently replicated multiple times across […]
Why do people who haven’t earned trust think they are entitled to it?
| March 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Now there’s a psych research question for you. From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS, more public handwringing about popular distrust of science: Is the popularization of science encouraging a growing disrespect for scientific expertise? So why do a large percentage of the public ignore the conclusions of disciplinary experts? I would argue that an important driver […]
Nature’s new rules: Can scientists be honest if they don’t believe that lying is a sin?
| March 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Ethics, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science, Science, worldview issues/foundations and society |
From the editors of Nature: As part of a broader effort to improve reporting quality, Nature and the Nature journals introduced a reporting checklist for life-sciences papers in 2013. This asked authors to reveal some key details of experimental design. Last year, this checklist evolved into a broader reporting-summary document that is published alongside manuscripts to […]
Peer review 9-11: China leads the world in biomedical fraud
| March 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Alex Berezow at Foreign Policy Review: In early 2017, R&D Magazine forecast that China would spend nearly $430 billion on research and development by the end of the year, amounting to nearly 21 percent of the estimated global total — a contribution second only to that of the United States ($527 billion). That money, […]
Does reliability of published works decrease with journal rank?
| February 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From neuroscientist (zoology) Björn Brembs at Frontier in Human Neuroscience: In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. However, data from several lines […]
Missing data hinder replication in AI studies too?
| February 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From Matthew Hutson at Science: The booming field of artificial intelligence (AI) is grappling with a replication crisis, much like the ones that have afflicted psychology, medicine, and other fields over the past decade. AI researchers have found it difficult to reproduce many key results, and that is leading to a new conscientiousness about research […]
At Nautilus: Scientists should not accept unreplicated results – yawn
| February 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From Ahmed Alkhateeb at Nautilus: Widespread irreproducibility is often misconceived as intentional fraud—which does occur, and is documented by websites like Retraction Watch. But the majority of irreproducible research stems from a complex matrix of statistical, technical, and psychological biases that are rampant within the scientific community. The institutionalization of science in the early decades […]
Matti Leisola: Another gifted scientist poised over the memory hole?
| February 10, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From ENST re Matti Leisola, Dr. Leisola is the former dean of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology, and the author of 140 peer-reviewed science publications on enzymes and rare sugars. Among other distinctions, he is a winner of the Latsis Prize of the ETH Zürich. While arguing, from vast experience, against […]
At Nature: Change how we judge research. Hmm…
| February 10, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
From Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology and assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion, at Nature: The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) … Conceived by a group of journal editors and publishers at a meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in December 2012, it proclaims a pressing need to […]
Human evolution 2018: Not only upended icons but suspicious relics
| January 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review |
Sahelanthropus is supposed to be the oldest bipedal hominin. From Gunter Bechly at Evolution News & Science Today: When John Hawks inquired with the original describer of Sahelanthropus, Professor Michel Brunet, he received the following remarkable reply: In Chad, we have uncovered thousands of bones, which are in the process of study. Perhaps among them […]
At the Guardian: A big problem with murky science journals is that they publish climate deniers
| January 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Climate change, Culture, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Oh? From Graham Readfearn at the Guardian: Deniers have found a platform in emerging publications that publish without rigorous review Journals that are “open access” make their money by charging academics or institutions a fee for peer reviewing and checking submitted academic manuscripts, and then publishing them. There are many reputable publishers working this way. […]
From Technology Review: How science gets morphed into propaganda
| January 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Not always how we think. Forewarned is forearmed. From Emerging Technology at MIT Review: How easy is it for malicious actors to distort the public perception of science? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor at the University of California, Irvine, and Justin Bruner at the Australian […]
Does it matter in science if no one can replicate your results?
| January 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Chris Drummond takes aim at the ‘reproducibility movement’ which has lately risen to prominence in science. … If we have multiple pieces of evidence for a hypothesis, but none of those pieces of evidence are reproducible, the hypothesis […]
Among the real reasons many people “hate science”: Prozac as cause, not cure, of mental illness
| December 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Medicine, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
From Jeanne Lenzer at Undark: In another case of cure as cause, a landmark study of Prozac to treat adolescent depression found that it increased overall suicidality — the very outcome it is intended to prevent. In the study, 15 percent of depressed adolescents treated with Prozac became suicidal, versus 6 percent treated with psychotherapy, […]
Censored researchers: Nutrition is a “degenerating” research paradigm
| December 19, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Edward Archer & Carl “Chip” J. Lavie at RealClearScience: ‘Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape. Since the 1950s, there was a naïve but politically expedient consensus that a person’s usual diet could be measured simply by asking what he or […]
Why so many useless science papers are written
| December 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Philosophy, Physics |
Because it pays. From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at BackReaction: To the end of producing popular papers, the best tactic is to work on what already is popular, and to write papers that allow others to quickly produce further papers on the same topic. This means it is much preferable to work on hypotheses that are […]
