Ramblings on academic-related matters.
For information on my research see
https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-study-of-children-s-communication-impairments. 
Twin analysis blog: http://dbtemp.blogspot.com/ . 
ERP time-frequency analysis blog: bishoptechbits.blogspot.com/ . 

For tweets, follow @deevybee.
I was recently asked to review a paper that piqued my curiosity. From the abstract it sounded as if it was a secondary analysis of a dataset that I had deposited in a repository. But the described data didn't quite match what was in the repository. As I usually do, I said I'd only review it if data and code were available. The authors complied: I was pointed at the repository where my data were…
Guest post by Matt Spick Photo: Parsadanov/Shutterstock.com From relative obscurity, paper mills have recently moved into the spotlight of academic attention. These organisations - which sell manuscripts or citations to authors to enhance scholarly metrics - are growing so rapidly that many fields are being overwhelmed. The overall proportion of paper mill outputs was estimated at 1.5–2% of all…
On Friday I attended (virtually) a workshop organised by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences . On social media, the workshop attracted a lot of critical commentary, mainly because it included a "fireside chat" with Jay Bhattacharya, who is currently the Director of the…
Exactly five months ago, I blogged about a program entitled Foundations of a Resilient Microbiome (FORM) that Wellcome LEAP was funding to the tune of $50 million. I had major reservations about the foundations of the research program, which seemed based on flaky research. By coincidence, the 2025 funding call for FORM came out a couple of weeks before publication of a review that I co-authored…
Source: http://www.weblogcartoons.com/2008/11/23/ideas/ Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed a lack of thematic coherence. I write about whatever is exercising my mind at the time, which can range from technical aspects of statistics to the design of bathroom taps. I decided it might be helpful to introduce a bit of order into this chaotic melange, so here is a catalogue of posts by…
Authors René Aquarius , Floris Schoeters , Alex Glynn , Guillaume Cabanac An update on stealth corrections Last year, we published an article describing stealth corrections , a phenomenon in which a publisher makes at least one post-publication change to a scientific article, without providing a correction note or any other indicator that the publication was temporarily or permanently altered.…
PubPeer is sometimes discussed as if it is some kind of cesspit where people smear honest scientists with specious allegations of fraud. I'm always taken aback when I hear this, since it is totally at odds with my experience. When I conducted an analysis of PubPeer comments concerning papers from UK universities published over a two-year period, I found that all 345 of them conformed to PubPeer's…
to: Editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi , kabbasi@bmj.com Executive editor, Theodora Bloom , tbloom@bmj.com Head of research, Elizabeth Loder , eloder@bmj.com Head of journalism, Rebecca Coombes , rcoombes@bmj.com Publication ethics and content integrity editor, BMJ Journals, Helen Macdonald , hmacdonald@bmj.com Handling academic editor, Juan Franco , juanfranco@bmj.com Dear Editors We are writing to…
This week I attended a Webinar organised by Clarivate on the topic of “ Eugene Garfield Centenary Celebration: Past, Present and Future of Scientometrics ”. This covered the early history of the late Eugene Garfield’s work as well as current developments and future trends. The historical sessions were fascinating, describing the remarkable innovations that Garfield made in his quest to understand…
My Norxin sting operation Guest post by Csaba Szabo Chair of Pharmacology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland After the limited success of my prior sting operation , I have decided to do a second one. I cannot follow up on all the scummy and fishy invitations that I receive on an almost daily basis, but this one from Norxin's "Sherry" (obviously, not a real name – did you notice, by the way, how…
I was interested to receive an email from eLife last week, telling me that "As part of our commitment to open science, scientific rigour and transparency we now accept submissions of Replication Studies". Sounds good, I thought, but on reading further I became increasingly dismayed. I think the way this is set up dooms it to failure. Back in 2023, when eLife created a storm by altering its…
A few days ago, I saw this post on LinkedIn: How does the gut microbiome shape early brain development? That’s what FORM, a new $50 million programme from Wellcome Leap, aims to answer. Critically, it wants to identify the role of the microbiome in autism and other neurological disorders. Applicants from universities, companies and non-profits are invited to submit project proposals by 14…
In my previous blogpost , I discussed why many scientists can't take seriously the lofty ideals expressed in Trump's plans for Gold Standard Science, even though the basic principles seem excellent. Given the current Republican administration's catastrophic track record in undermining US science, their demands for high standards ring hollow. It appears that demands for Gold Standard Science will…
In May, the White House produced a report called " Restoring Gold Standard Science ", which was followed by an NIH plan to implement this policy. The initial report pointed to the well-attested problems with reproducibility in science, and to high-profile cases of research fraud, and recommended nine requirements for Gold Standard science. It must be: (i) reproducible; (ii) transparent; (iii)…
Complaints about the broken academic publishing system have been around for years and are getting louder. A common theme is that with the rise of open access publishing, commercial publishers have grasped the opportunity to grow their profits from article-processing-charges (APCs). Whereas in the past, journals competed to be the most highly respected outlet, now they compete to publish on the…
I guess many readers will have had peer reviews where the reviewer doesn't appear to have understood, or even properly read, the paper they are criticising. But I doubt that you'll have experienced anything like Pérez et al (2023). Their growing exasperation with increasingly irrelevant comments can be sensed in their response to reviewer 2 , who asked them to revise statements that were…
by Csaba Szabo, Columbia University Press, 2025 This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research. I first became aware of this book back in February 2024 when the publisher asked me to review the draft. By happy coincidence I had just submitted an…
Guest post by Solal Pirelli The IEEE, full name Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is one of the main scientific publishers in domains related to its name. Many IEEE venues, such as ICSE in software engineering and IROS in robotics, are “top” venues that publish important research. While these are conferences and not journals, computer science and related fields are unusual in that…
Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In brief, over the summer a group of 74 FRSs asked the RS Council to consider revoking Musk's FRS on the grounds that he had attempted to interfere with British politics by spreading disinformation with the aim of stirring up unrest. The Council took advice, considered carefully and concluded…
Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense. In a recent Open Letter , a group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature. After the Open Letter was published, the paper that instigated our concern was promptly retracted…
It's always interesting for a blogger to look back to see which posts have garnered most attention. In 2024 there were three standout items, my resignation from the Royal Society , an Open Letter about editorial failings at the journal Scientific Reports , and a guest post by René Aquarius about his experiences as a reviewer for MDPI. For each of these blogposts, it's interesting to consider not…
It's been an odd week for the academic publisher MDPI. On 16th December, Finland's Publication Forum (known as JUFO) announced that from January 2025 it was downgrading its classification of 271 open access journals to the lowest level, zero. By my calculations, this includes 187 journals from MDPI and 82 from Frontiers, plus 2 others. This is likely to deter Finnish researchers from submitting…
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. It promotes science in many ways: administering grants, advising government, holding meetings and lectures, and publishing expert reports on scientific matters of public importance. There are currently around 1,800 Fellows…
There's been a fair bit of discussion about Clarivate's decision to pause inclusion of eLife publications on the Science Citation Index (e.g. on Research Professional ). What I find exasperating is that most of the discussion focuses on a single consequence - loss of eLife's impact factor. For authors, there are graver consequences. I've reviewed for eLife but never published there; however, I…
Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports , a mega-journal published by Springer Nature. This week I look at a journal at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (JPR), a small, specialist journal which has published just 2187 papers since it was founded in 1971. This is fewer than Scientific Reports publishes in one year. It was…