The adventures of a self-appointed data police cadet
I first had this idea about 10 years ago. Don't ask me why I've sat on it for so long. (If you think it's stupid, feel free to mutter "You should have sat on it for a bit longer" under your breath.) This is a serious proposal, so probably I should be doing it with more than just a blog post, but here goes anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think that we † should build a platform to make meta-analyses, systematic…
Readers who have followed the development of GRIM might recall that we (that's me and the Wild Man of Boston ) asked 21 researchers for their data. We got nine datasets, and the responses from the other 12 varied between silence and borderline hostility — in two cases, which shared no co-authors, identically-worded borderline hostility. However, one of the most surprising responses was not a…
In my previous blog post I mentioned that the next one, which you are reading now, would look at a recent paper from Nicolas Guéguen that I investigated using a technique that James Heathers and I (mostly me, this time) developed, which we call RIVETS . RIVETS is a fairly minor part of the data-forensic toolbox. I think it's worth reading the preprint linked above, but then I am biased. However,…
Loyal readers of this blog may have been wondering if there have been any updates on the Nicolas Guéguen story since I wrote this post back in June 2020. Well, actually there have! First, in April 2022 an Expression of Concern was issued regarding the article that I discussed in this open letter , which was the first paper by Guéguen that I ever looked at. Of course, issuing an EOC — which is…
This post is about some issues in Study 3 of the following article: Lee, J. J., Hardin, A. E., Parmar, B., & Gino, F. (2019). The interpersonal costs of dishonesty: How dishonest behavior reduces individuals' ability to read others' emotions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 148 (9), 1557–1574. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000639 On 2023-11-06 I was able to download the article from…
This post is about some issues in the following article, and most notably its dataset: Mo, C. H., Jachimowicz, J. M., Menges, J. I., & Galinsky, A. D. (2023). The impact of incidental environmental factors on vote c hoice: Wind speed is related to more prevention‑focused voting. Political Behavior . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09865-y You can download the article…
In this post I'm going to be discussing this article: Zhang, T., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2016). The surprising effectiveness of hostile mediators. Management Science , 63 (6) , 1972–1992. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2431 You can download the article from here and the dataset from here . [[ Begin update 2023-07-03 16:12 UTC ]] Following feedback from several sources, I now see how it is in…
The investigation of scientific misconduct by Ivy League universities is once again in the news at the moment, which prompts me to write up something that I should have written up quite a while ago. (The time I spend thinking about, and trying to help people understand, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made as big a dent in my productivity as Covid-19.) On October 31, 2018, I sent an open…
In this post I'm going to be discussing this article, but mostly its dataset: Néma, J., Zdara, J., Lašák, P., Bavlovič, J., Bureš, M., Pejchal, J., & Schvach, H. (2023). Impact of cold exposure on life satisfaction and physical composition of soldiers. BMJ Military Health . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1136/military-2022-002237 The article itself doesn't need much commentary from…
In an earlier post I reported on a number of apparently plagiarised or self-plagiarised articles by Dr Paul McCrory. Since then there have been a number of developments in this story, which has attracted attention from media worldwide, especially in Australia, led by Melissa Davey of the Guardian, who has written about the present blog post here . In this post I present 10 more examples of…
Martin Enserink has just published the third instalment in an ongoing story of strange results and possible → likely → confirmed misconduct in the field of marine biology, and more specifically the purported effects of climate change on the behaviour of fish. The first two instalments are here (2020) and here (2021). After Martin's 2021 article, I wrote this blog post describing a few analyses…
Dr Paul McCrory of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health has been in the news in the past few days. This started with a single retraction of an apparently plagiarised editorial piece in the British Journal of Sports Medicine from 2005, but after I started digging further and more problems came to light, he has now resigned as chair of the influential Concussion in Sport Group…
A few months ago, I discovered that the SAS statistical software package, which is used worldwide by universities and other large organisations to analyse their data, contained—until quite recently—a bug that could result in information that the user thought they had successfully deleted (and was no longer visible from within the application itself) still being present in the saved data file. This…
In this post I will discuss a set of 46 articles from the same institution that appear to show severe problems in many journals in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. These are not entirely new discoveries; worrying overlaps among 35 of these articles have already been investigated in a commentary article from 2020 by Esmée Bordewijk and colleagues that critiqued 24 articles on which Dr Ahmed…
Back in 2017, Dr. John Carlisle published this article in which he described a novel method for examining the table of participants' baseline characteristics (usually Table 1) in reports of randomised trials. Table 1 is typically used to show that the randomisation "worked", which in general means that the groups do not differ on important variables more often than we would expect by chance (with…
Nitazoxanide (NTZ) is an antiparasitic medication that has been proposed as a possible treatment for Covid-19. (The currently most widely-touted repurposed drug for Covid-19, Ivermectin, is also an antiparasitic.) The effects of NTZ were recently examined in this paper: Blum, V. F., Cimerman, S., Hunter, J. R., Tierno, P., Lacerda, A., Soeiro, A., Cardoso, F., Bellei, N. C., Maricato, J.,…
This post appears at the same time as this piece at grftr.news by Jack Lawrence . Jack contacted me to ask if I could help him look at a number of issues with a prominent study of Ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19. My speciality is forensic numerical data analysis finding errors in numbers, so I concentrated on that and suggested some other names to Jack to help him look at things like the…
Today's topic is this report in Science by Martin Enserink about possible scientific misconduct in a series of studies that investigate the relation between increasing CO 2 levels (causing a decrease in the pH of the world's oceans) and the behaviour of fish. Martin's report gives most of the background that you will need to follow this post. While he was preparing it, he asked me to look at the…
In this post I want to discuss why I blog directly about what I see as errors or other problems in scientific articles. I had the idea to write this some time ago, and indeed some of the sentences below have been sitting in my drafts folder for quite a while, but the discussions on Twitter about my most recent post have prodded me to finally write this up. (However, I don't go into that post or…
Update 2021-01-27 13:11 UTC: Added the word "apparent" to the post title. That should have been there before. Update 2021-01-26 14:28 UTC: With the permission of Kevin Hall I have reproduced his responses in line below, in italics and bracketed by [KH... / ...KH]. I believe that these responses adequately address all of the points that I made in the original post. Update 2021-01-22 23:21 UTC: I…
A few days ago I posted this tweet: Germany's COVID-19 cases peaked about 18 days ago, but their deaths are still going up very fast. That seems like a longer lag than we see elsewhere. pic.twitter.com/E6aUztI2No — Nick Brown (@sTeamTraen) December 2, 2020 In reply to that, I was contacted privately by “Dominique” (not their real name), a Twitter user whose profile says that they are an intensive…
One of the recurring topics in this blog over the last couple of years has been self-plagiarism, also known as duplicate publication or text recycling. I've shown that a number of senior scholars appear to have used this method to boost their number of publications without having to go to the effort of producing new research , or rewriting existing knowledge substantially for a new audience.…
In academic publishing, what is the purpose of a journal issuing an "Expression of Concern" (EoC)? When I first came across the concept, I was told that an EoC was a sort of preliminary step on the way to retraction. The journal acknowledges that it has received information that suggests that an article may not be reliable. This information seems, on the face of it, to be quite convincing. The…
Regular readers of this blog may recall seeing a number of posts about the remarkable research of Dr Nicolas Guéguen . In 2017 I wrote here and here (and James Heathers wrote here and here ) about several articles with Dr Guéguen as sole author that seemed to have a number of problems, which we summarized here . In May 2019 James and I posted an update in which we reported that the university had…
Just over a month ago, I published these two blog posts. After the first, Daniël Lakens tweeted this: I hope you forwarded a link to your blog to the university ethics person at these 12 respective institutions? At least a benefit of having so many authors is that 1 uni might take some sort of action? — Daniël Lakens (@lakens) April 21, 2020 I thought that was a good idea, so I set out to find who…