Letter in the Chronicle: The Open Science Movement is Cooperative, not Destructive

Together with a group of colleagues, Michèle wrote a letter to the editor of the Chronicle, to reply to an earlier article that presented the open science movement as “burning things to the ground”. Michèle and her colleagues disagreed. They argue that they mainly see cooperative, constructive, and pragmatic initiatives to improve the state of psychological science.

Read the full letter here.

Chartier, C. R., Kline, M. E., McCarthy, R. J., Nuijten, M. B., Dunleavy, D. J., & Ledgerwood, A. A cooperative revolution in psychology. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/a-cooperative-revolution-in-psychology/.

The Truth Squad

The Meta-Research Center has been featured in volume 361, issue 6408 of the Science Magazine published on September 21, 2018. We are honored to see the impact of our work in this special issue of the Science magazine covering the importance and growth of the meta-research.

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From Replication to Reproducible knowledge: A hybrid method to combine evidence across studies

The recent publication of Robbie van Aert and Marcel van Assen in the Behavior Research Methods journal has been featured on Psychonomic Society's Blog by Stephan Lewandowsky.

The blog post outlines the issue of combining the results of a replication study with the results of an originally published experiment, as well as describing van Aert and van Assen's hybrid meta-analysis technique that addresses this issue. 

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Radio interview: dr Kelder & Co

Saturday June 30, Michèle was interviewed about her dissertation for the Dutch radio show “Dr Kelder & Co”, for NPO Radio 1. The main takeaways: scientists are also just people, psychology is heading into the right direction, and trains don’t always do what you want.

Listen to the whole interview (in Dutch) here.

"statcheck" in the Guardian's Weekly Science Podcast

This week the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast focuses on statistical malpractice and fraud in science. Michèle talks about the role of statcheck in detecting statistical inconsistencies, and discusses the causes and implications of seemingly innocent rounding errors. This podcast also offers fascinating insights from consultant anasesthetist John Carlisle about the detection of data fabrication, and president of the Royal Statistical Society David Spiegelhalter about the dangers of statistical malpractice.

Long Read About Fraud Detection Research in the Guardian

The long-read in the Guardian today by Stephen Buranyi featured our work at the Meta-Research Center. Specifically, it focuses on the work of Chris Hartgerink and Marcel van Assen on detecting fabricated data, and how the development and use of statcheck played a role in their research. Read the full article here.

Media Attention for `statcheck`

Lately there has been quite some media attention for statcheck. In a piece in Nature, Monya Baker has written a thorough and nuanced overview of statcheck and the PubPeer project of Chris Hartgerink, in which he scanned 50,000 papers and posted the statcheck results on the online forum PubPeer. In the Nature editorial this type of post-publication peer review is discussed. Some other interesting coverage of statcheck can be found here:

• Buranyi, S. (2016). Scientists are worried about `peer review by algorithm’. Motherboard (VICE). URL
• Resnick, B. (2016). A bot crawled thousands of studies looking for simple math errors. The results are concerning. Vox. URL
• Kershner, K. (2016). Statcheck: when bots `correct’ academics. How Stuff Works.  URL
• Keulemans, M. (2016). Worden sociale wetenschappen geterroriseerd door jonge onderzoekers?: Oorlog onder psychologen. De Volkskrant. URL