Happy "large enough n" day

incisive essay by @eugenie-reich.bsky.social on corrections that should have been retractions retractionwatch.com/2026/03/23/g...

The unidimensionality epidemic, also caused by the cellphone.

New report: Joel, Eastwick, & Finkel (2017) “Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Romantic Attraction”. Based on the review by @florianpargent.bsky.social, we find Minor Errors that do not affect the core conclusions of the manuscript. osf.io/hxnum

TrialScout links published results to trial registrations using a large language model https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.15.26348383v1

Save the date: 1st Interdisciplinary Symposium on Meta Science for Methods Research (MSMR 2026) How can we improve research on research methods? 📍 Zurich, Switzerland (+ livestream for attendance) 📅 August 31 – September 1, 2026 🔗 crsuzh.pages.uzh.ch/msmr/

What an issue! RegCheck is among some excellent company here 👏 www.sci-integrity.com/reach-januar...

It was an honour to have RegCheck featured in this most recent issue of REACH magazine. Check it out below!

The January-March 2026 issue of REACH is now live! 🎉 📘Inside: CRediT, the Einstein Foundation Award, Cochrane's 30th anniversary, Jennifer Byrne on paper mills, our SIA Special Report on AI Stress Points in Scholarly Publishing (Part I), and much more! 👉🏻 www.sci-integrity.com/reach-januar...

Hey, I am not saying I have found the *BEST* commentary for yesterday, but I think I have (Argentina). 😂 Covers both Arsenal goals, Gyökeres and Max Dowman. I promise you won't be disappointed. 🔴⚪🔊

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing. They're bragging"

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

Any sufficiently advanced file-drawer is indistinguishable from p-hacking

If you currently do not have a reproducible workflow where you can share data and code where possible, I expect you will soon not be able to publish in good journals. Beyond being best practice, journals will use this to identify papers written by AI. Plan a new project accordingly.

Now published in Collabra! online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... Using test data from TwinLife (N=9,980, Culture Fair Test CFT 20-R), we show that Regularised Prediction and Poststratification yields IQ scores that differ by up to 19 IQ points (mean 4.19 pts) from those reported in the CFT 20-R manual

New post from me on The 100% CI. Think inside the box, part 1: The guy Euclidean distance told you not to worry about www.the100.ci/2026/03/09/t...

Just read the abstract 🫠 via Alexander Magazinov. I don't believe he is on Bluesky.

Here's to a radical future where openly-available IPD is the default!

New post! It may seem ambitious to ask for individual patient data from clinical trials to be shared, anonymized, for use by other researchers. But the history of medicine shows us that clinical trials have already undergone a series of transformations that once seemed equally bold:

Two new papers from the lab on research practices in security & privacy research: 1) Reliability of measures and the use of Cronbach's α osf.io/preprints/ps..., 2) Practices around retraction and correction notices by ACM and IEEE (osf.io/preprints/ps...)

New episode of HARD DRUGS! Should everyone be taking statins? Statins have revolutionised heart disease and they're one of many reasons for the long-term decline in cardiovascular mortality.

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c Now it's over to users! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

We regret to inform you that your paper cannot be considered for publication, but we encourage you to submit it to our GOLD Open Access sister journal

The latest episode of our @bpsofficial.bsky.social @researchdigest.bsky.social podcast PsychCrunch. We took a different approach to this one, and I'm really grateful to @maddipow.bsky.social @richardwiseman.bsky.social @margaritap.bsky.social @jamiecummins.bsky.social and others for contributing.

Economists! I am looking for someone to coauthor an article on the massive decline in costs of genome sequencing. The science is all fine, but I'm interested in the economics of it all: the innovation, funding, prizes, patents, etc. Does anyone come to mind? Thanks!

Just used this (very interesting!) paper as an example to try out RegCheck v2 for the first time. RegCheck.app by @jamiecummins.bsky.social et al. is an OpenSource LLM-based tools to compare a published study against a replication plan. All the usual LLM caveats apply. But seems pretty useful.

Really nice piece on @psychmag.bsky.social by @jamiecummins.bsky.social this month! Thanks for writing this Jamie! 👌🏼

📣 New preprint! We brought together experts from academia, major video game studios, NGOs, funding bodies, and civil society groups to ask: what should be prioritised when it comes to the future of video games? 🧵

3. Generating clearer inputs for downstream tools Imagine you're in a world in which LLMs play an increasingly larger role in research. Tools like RegCheck screen for compliance against pre-analysis plans. It may all the more important to ensure that your plans are clearly documented. 6/

I've built a new tool! You can upload your pre-analysis plan or registered report, pre-submission to a registry or journal, and it will screen it for completeness, clarity, and consistency. 1/ 🧵

This is a no-brainer. Metascience is not accountable if it is not transparent about the research that it uses or critiques.

Should meta-science articles hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and reproducibility that the field prescribes for others? We think so. New preprint and 🧵

Meta-scientists cannot demand transparency from scientists while failing to meet those same standards. In this paper we make one simple recommendation: meta-scientific data should be deanonymised by default.

Against Anonymising Meta-Scientific Data: https://osf.io/6eyjf

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

Our lab has the capacity to test ~500 uni students each semester If you’re a researcher in cognitive psychology or metascience and need data collection support, we’d love to collaborate. We can help collect high-quality data from a large student sample. Get in touch to discuss potential projects!

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Everything is ready for the Perspectives on Scientific Error conference that starts tomorrow in Leiden! I look forward to hanging out with the mix of metascientists, philosophers of science, and statisticians! So many old friends will be there (and hopefully some new ones)! #PSE8

NEW BLOG! Ruxandra Teslo @ruxandrabio.bsky.social, Adam Kroetsch, Manjari Narayan @neurostats.org, Witold Więcek and I have started a joint blog on clinical trial reform. We'll aim to publish weekly on how to make clinical trials more efficient. Subscribe: clinicaltrialsabundance.blog

Psychology needs a… revolution www.bps.org.uk/psychologist... @maddipow.bsky.social @richardwiseman.bsky.social @joakimsundh.bsky.social @jamiecummins.bsky.social @lizstokoe.bsky.social @margaritap.bsky.social and others…

had a little grumble about failure to implement data sharing policy at @bmj.com www.bmj.com/content/389/...

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?> With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit  @retractionwatch.com retractionwatch.com/2026/02/03/m...

Our new paper, with colleagues from the Strategic Council of the National Academies, offers an integrative framework of the several components that contribute to making research findings trustworthy including ethics, methodology, transparency, inclusion, assessment, etc www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

All my #rstats ebooks are now in the quarto format, and hosted on Quarto Pub. Their old bookdown links will all be dead by the weekend. 1/3

At low base rates, specificity works in extremely counterintuitive ways, as shown below. Generally, we think ML is going to help a lot with spotting paper mills and Scancar et al's classifier seems to work very well! BMJ Comment: www.bmj.com/content/392/... PubPeer: pubpeer.com/publications...

This headline number has generated a lot of attention, but does not account for the classifier's accuracy. @jamiecummins.bsky.social and I wrote a short commentary showing that, assuming a paper mill base rate of 10%, 30% of the flagged papers are false positives. At a base rate of 5%, 50% are FPs.

If you're interested in data sleuthing but aren't sure where to start, or if you're conducting a systematic review/meta-analysis and want to ensure you're not including junk studies, check out this Cochrane training session on Trustworthiness Assessment by @jdwilko.bsky.social