I generally roll my eyes whenever someone prophesises an upcoming apocalypse. I’ve heard enough promises of fire and brimstone that have not yet come to pass to remain optimistic about most things. Yet, when I was holding my annual open science workshop for a masters programme at my local university, I found myself telling the students: “I predict that the peer review system will collapse in the…
We still have a long way to go when it comes to designing good theories, at least in psychological science. On the topic of 'we have a long way to go', psychology is often juxtaposed with physics, where one might get the impression that physics is doing better than psychology, as a science, on all counts. Embarrassingly for psychologists, Popper famously compared Einstein's and Freud's theories,…
A lot of good things start with “r”: Replicability, reproducibility, robustness, reading, running, relaxing, and if you include German words as well, then also “travelling” and “cycling”. Some of these r-words are more controversial than others. “Replicability” and “reproducibility” often occur with the word “crisis”, suggesting a negative connotation. On a more basic level, some r-words are more…
LinkedIn suggested a job as a perfect match for my skills: Being a ghost writer. Curious, I clicked on the job description, thinking: “This can’t possibly be what it sounds like, right?” It was. According to the website, the ghost writing agency has their seat in Berlin, and they have anonymised reviews by happy university students who’d received a high grade on their assignment or thesis thanks…
Admittedly, I have yet to publish any large-scale cross-linguistic study. Actually, I have not even completed data collection for such a study yet. Cross-linguistic research on reading is hard. It is, however, very important, as has been argued in a couple of high-profile publications in the last years (Blasi et al., 2022; Huettig & Ferreira, 2022; Share, 2021; Siegelman et al., 2022; Vaid, 2022)…
I recently got a grant rejection - but I swear this blog post won't be whinging about rejections. Rather, I'd like to start by sharing a reviewer's comment that surprised me: The proposal is not novel, they wrote, because it's all about replicability and open science and blah blah blah, and we already know all about that since the Ioannidis 2005 paper, published almost 20 years ago now! Yes, I…
I had to force my hand to sign my last work contract. A work contract for 12 more month, plus an additional document with a justification that my activities will contribute to my further qualifications, so that the contract can fall under the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz - a blatant lie, as I've already finished my habilitation, the highest qualification one can achieve. I bit my tongue,…
I think I really need a holiday. Many of us are researchers because, in some way or another, we want to make science better. Yet, we rarely keep this goal in mind explicitly when planning a specific project. If we do, how would a research project look like? This seemingly simple question sent me on a downward spiral: What could I do that might really make a difference? Where do I want to make a…
My toddler is growing up in a linguistic environment that I call multilingual and some people tell us is "confusing". Growing up with multiple languages is, of course, the norm in many places, and has the positive side effect of children being able to speak more than one language by the time they grow up. Given my convictions about the benefits of growing up multilingually, I was excited to find…
As we're moving flats soon, I threw out a pile of papers, about half a meter tall when all stacked up. I've accumulated these papers over the last 6 years that we've been living in our current flat. They include different types of papers: 1) Papers that I started reading but then realised they weren't as relevant or interesting as I thought. 2) Papers that I printed because the title and abstract…
Three years ago (before COVID and the birth of my now toddler, which have put my academic life on hold in some ways), I wrote a New Year's post summarising my year and my new year's resolutions. Though I see it as a kind of superstition, I still like to take this time of the year to think about my achievements so far, and about what I need to do next to get where I want to get (and, of course,…
I have not been active on social media for a while, and I must admit that keeping off social media did not feel like a big loss. Lately, I have started checking in more frequently again, though. Ironically, the reason for this is my consideration of whether I should delete my Twitter account or not. I will not pretend like I know exactly what's going on with the whole Elon-Musk-buying-Twitter…
Earlier this week, I published a Twitter poll with a question relating to peer review. Here is the poll, as well as the results of 91 voters (see here for a link to the poll and to the responses): The issue is one that I touched in my last blogpost : When we think that a paper that we are reviewing should be rejected, should we make this opinion clear to the editor, or is it simply our role to…
A friend, who had decided not to pursue a PhD and an academic career after finishing his Masters degree, asked me how it's possible that so many of the papers that are published in peer-reviewed journals are - well - bullshit. As a response, I told him about a recent experience of mine. A while ago, I was asked to review a paper by a journal with a pretty high impact factor. I agreed: the paper…
One of my earliest childhood memories is my dad's habilitation party. My mum, sister and I met my dad in front of a huge building, the library of the University of Bonn. While we waited for him, my mum explained what a habilitation was. I don't remember her explanation in detail, but this is what I took away from it at the time: Our dad had to publish some things, which were now available in this…
For me, the last month has been a lot about rethinking and re-planning, about cancelling existing plans, or putting them on hold for an indeterminate amount of time. One of my grand plans for this year had been to establish a seminar series at my department. After all, in my view, research cannot progress unless there is exchange of ideas, unless we learn about new approaches, and meeting new…
On social media, extroverts are jokingly asking introverts for advice on how they survive being by themselves for long periods of time. Being extremely introverted, this is indeed a question that I don't hear that often. And while I realise that it's often being asked as a joke or a rhetorical question, I'm going to do the socially awkward thing (being an introvert) and give a long, serious answer…
I've been in academia for 9 years now (counting from the beginning my PhD), and I don't actually hate my job most of the time. But sometimes I do, and then I wonder why I'm continuing in academia rather than finding a more stable, more well-paid job. There are different things that make me wonder about that on a regular basis. Why write a blogpost about those things? As a selfish reason, I hope…
Scientists are supposed to be rational. Yet, at times, it feels like staying in academia is a completely irrational decision. The chances of success - a professorship, or gaining some prestigious grant - are low. The stakes - working overtime, dealing with high competition, occupational instability - are high. The current blog post is inspired by a grant rejection. With a grant proposal, one…
In some ways, the year 2019 has been remarkably unremarkable for me. In the beginning of the year, I started on a DFG-funded project, so the most acute uncertainties associated with employment have been postponed for another few years. The beginning of the project is slow; data collection has just started, projects from the previous years are at various stages of non-completion and imperfection.…
TL;DR: Please spend some time to make sure that the full texts to your articles are freely available, and remind your colleagues to do the same. As it turns out, I'm a huge hypocrite. I regularly do talks about how to make your research workflow open. “Start with little steps”, I say. “The first thing you can do is to make your papers openly available by posting pre-prints”, I say. “It's easy!”, I…
Update (27.12.2021): The content of this blog post has been extended and published in the following article: Schmalz, X., Biurrun Manresa, J., & Zhang, L. (2021). What is a Bayes factor? Psychological Methods . Preprint: https://osf.io/5geqt/. TL;DR: Do you need a justification for your prior parameters in JASP? Scroll down to find fill-in-the-blank sentences which you can use, and a table where…
The year 2018 was very successful for me in terms of grants: My success rate skyrocketed from close to 0% to 100%. It’s a never-ending story, though, so now I’m finding myself writing even more grant proposals, which led me to procrastinate and write a blog post about grant proposal writing. Given my recent successes, I could frame this blog post as a set of advices for other aspiring grant…
For Registered Reports, grant applications, ethics applications, and similar documents, researchers are expected to provide a power calculation. From my own experience, and from talking with colleagues in many different contexts, this is often a hurdle. Calculating power requires an effect size estimate. Sometimes, we try new things and have no idea what the size of the effect will be: even if we…
Last year, I went to an R Ladies event. This event took place at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the biggest and most serious newspapers in Germany. The workshop was presented by two R Ladies from the data-driven journalism department of the newspaper. The event was extremely interesting: as it turns out, the job of a data-driven journalist is to collect or find data, and present it to the readers…