So anyway, how is your New Years Eve going ..

Today the Swiss announced they don't have an agreement with Springer Nature -- swissuniversity tried to secure a deal and failed in the face of the extreme rise in publishing fees. When the game is rigged, it's better to stop playing. 🧵 to understand the drain of scientific publishing👇

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

Our university press team asked me a few questions in regards to the new chair on Mental Health & Data Science. I sketch a bit of a vision on the importance of transdisciplinary work, and some obstacles to overcome. www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

Nice writeup of our new study in @jamapsychiatry.com by Kyle Mittan, a colleague here at @uarizona.bsky.social news.arizona.edu/news/confuse...

1/n Out today in @jamapsychiatry.com: Interpretation Issues With the Patient Health Questionnaire Instructions. We find troubling variability in whether people think they should respond based on the frequency of the Sx or the frequency of being bothered by the Sx. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Thanks @janhove.bsky.social for taking the time to check the paper — something that paid editors at Nature, as well as unpaid reviewers — apparently did not. Also shows once more that providing statistical code should be mandatory for every single paper. janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Critique argues post-publication peer review "often focuses on minor details" and "risks damaging trust in both the research itself and the peer review process" found to contain: - Hallucinated references - Undisclosed COIs (EiC is author) - 8/9 authors have retractions or related scandals

Our new paper "Inconsistent outcome measurement in depression psychotherapy trials: A systematic historical and meta-analytic review over the past 50 years" led by @antoniasprenger.bsky.social is out now in JAD. 🧪 #PsychSciSky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preregistered preprint by @emkbridger.bsky.social (w J Maltby, @danielnettle.bsky.social & @larsklintwall.bsky.social). We queried a UK-representative lay sample to rated perceived causal influence between 20 biopsychosocial causes linked to mental health & poverty. osf.io/preprints/ps...

are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson

We’re excited to share that Prof. Eiko Fried (@eikofried.bsky.social) will give a keynote titled “Measuring minds in motion: pitfalls and promises of AA methods in mental health science” at #SAA2026 in Vienna! We look forward to the perspectives he’ll bring to the programme.

Awesome preprint on model checking for VAR Models. Would love to see more "model checking" tutorial papers for various models, including a showcase what happens if the assumptions you impose on your data are not met in the data. 🧪 #psychscisky osf.io/preprints/ps...

Retracted Scientific Reports (Nature Group) paper entitled "Bridging the gap: explainable ai for autism diagnosis and parental support". Imagine how many people at a journal need to not do their job at all (editor, reviewers, copy editor) for this to get published...

Looks like Australia's social media ban came into effect. Age verification appears based on 1) facial scan age estimation or 2) ID scan. This in turn appears to be done by third party companies, so opens doors to privacy issues / leaks. Also, what exactly was the evidence base for this ban again?

I wonder how much quicker papers would be rejected or published on average if journal software would forward out of office responses of contacted reviewers to handling editors — something that requires advanced software available since ... *checks* ... the 90s.

Excited to share a Registered Report in J. of Personality looking at the “perils of partialing” – led by the Bluesky-less Leigha Rose with @drlynam.bsky.social and me. (1) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Diederik Stapel was a massive watershed moment in psychology. However, he was -- and let's be slightly glib here -- some guy from The Netherlands who wrote social psychology papers. The full accounting of the Eysenck case is approx, at minimum, TWO STAPELS. retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/n...

I only follow academic folks on here — given that this is the platform I choose to use for academia. Why is my timeline solely US politics? :(

Today is the day y'all :) 🥳 🎉

In the 2021 'international expert opinion' Ketamine paper, 19/25 authors have a combined 2100 words of conflicts of interests. html version of paper does not show COI, PDF does. Is that not a massive problem? html: psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/... pdf: psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10....

Facebook just reminded me it's been 12 years since I happened to sit next to Apocalyptica on the plane from Brussels to Berlin

1/2 New open access paper in which we apply the Nyquist-Shannon thereom from signal processing to 2 EMA datasets to figure out the optimal sampling frequency for EMA assessments. 🧪 #psychscisky #statssky www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

You’re no longer in the Netherlands when ..

Never change, ERC submission portal.

Empirically, more extensive project descriptions do not affect the eventual decision anyway: "We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

NL funder NWO recently changed rules for grant applications to endorse more modern recognition & reward practices. But in my reading, the updated preproposal rules (CV, output, & just the slightest teensy weensy hint of a research idea) fully lean into Matthew effect. Thoughts?

Calling this "challenging scientific orthodoxy" is a wild euphemism, NYT.

Either my understanding of the term 'unanimously' is flawed, or basically all US newsmedia in the last 24 hours have used the term incorrectly.

1/2 "In the last twenty years, countless attempts have been made to improve on the intuitive classifications of the past by subjecting clinical ratings, systematically collected from large populations of patients, to various forms of multivariate analysis. The result, as we have seen, ..

"Just why a scientist has a right to treat as elementary a subsystem that is in fact exceedingly complex is one of the questions we shall take up. For now, we shall accept the fact that scientists do this all the time & that if they are careful scientists they usually get away with it" (Herbert '62)

70 teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute & observed weekly over 5 months. 80% of spoons disappeared; spoon halflife~81 days. Communal room halflife lower than in specific labs. 250 spoons annually required to maintain 70 spoon population. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Turns out my coffee sips appear to have roughly similar volume.

LLMS as advanced anonymizers. arxiv.org/abs/2402.13846

People are holding administrative burden parties to collectively take on tasks www.wsj.com/lifestyle/re...

Anyone planning to go to APS 2026 working on clinical prediction models? We have a nice preprint on predicting depression severity in n~1700 using smartphone & smartwatch data, and would love to join a symposium or help putting one together :) www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

Nice NYT travel section piece on Leiden :). The photo at the top right of the website shows, incidentally, one of my favourite bridges in the Netherlands! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/t...

After having followed papers on the gut microbiome and mental health problems for a few years, I would not be surprised if conceptual and methodological flaws undermine most claims in this literature.

The observed smallest worthwhile difference in this study "means that the current 15% antidepressant benefit over no treatment was sufficient for 1 in 3 people to accept antidepressants given the burdens, but 2 in 3 expected greater treatment benefits."

I'm in Sydney until December 15th. If any tweeps (blueskyers?) are around lets get lunch or coffee! Also ... if you allow random strangers to join your D&D* group for a few weeks ... pleeeeeeease let me know :))) ___ * or whatever pen & paper y'all are up to

Four interesting methods & stats winter courses at Leiden University also open to researchers and PhD candidates who are not affiliated with us. www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/social-be...

This one surely has something on offer for every one: In this cross-sectional mediation analysis, the "effects" of soft drink consumption on depression were "mediated" by abundance of Eggerthela in the gut microbiome. This was sent to me via dm and now you all got to suffer as well.

This thread has everything I loved about Twitter 2017/2018: several thoughtful expert suggestions that cover different angles, interspersed with excellent jokes, trolling of scientific journals, and philosophical debates about aging.

Been thinking for a few years about what I call the *replication ceiling*: the maximum replicability of an effect given constraints in data in which replication takes place (power, measurement error, sampling variability, etc). This leads to a maximum theoretical replicability which can be achieved.

Love everything about this, from the suggestive“Yes!” to back pain all the way to the “free” consultation.

"Journal style does not allow 3-dimensional figures. Please rework Figure 5 into a figure with only 2 axes if possible"