How long should it take to retract a paper with incontrovertible signs of data fabrication? Sleuths think 2 months is too long, particularly when clinical risks are involved. deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/01/an-o... #retraction #stemcells #cardiology @erictopol.bsky.social

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Obligatory blog post: www.the100.ci/2017/03/14/t... Elwert & Winship (2014) if you crave something more serious: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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!

This is a fun one. Vitamin D for Mongolian schoolchildren. The main study has been cited hundreds of times, it forms a large part of many meta-analyses showing that vitamin D reduces the incidence of respiratory infections.

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

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

"I'm not influenced." "My colleagues are influenced, but I'm not." "I have ties with all the, companies, so I'm not influenced by any.” Lisa Bero describing the ways people rationalise their conflicts of interest, opening the #AIMOS2025 conference @aimosinc.bsky.social

Confidence interval discussion time! The perfect opportunity to repost this blog post answering the question you haven’t dared to ask: www.the100.ci/2024/12/05/w...

Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration A call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort. Bernhard Sabel and Dan Larhammar royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

@bmj.com Please look at PubPeer comments on an article you published last week. pubpeer.com/publications... I think your research integrity dept shld act swiftly on this one, given clinical significance. I'm aware of even more evidence of problems so let me know if this is not sufficient.

Tool for Addressing Conflicts of Interest in Trials (TACIT), included in systematic reviews, is now available! Developed by experts led by Lundh & Hróbjartsson at Cochrane Denmark. Try the unpublished tool: osf.io/5fzv3/. Learn more at www.tacit.one and share feedback with @alundh.bsky.social!

While *ideal* impact factor is well known to be a bad proxy of article quality, it is less well known that *actual* impact factor is negotiated and gamed by journals. You think Nature earned that impact factor? You think that's air you're breathing? (see e.g. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...)

Strong #metascience2025

There is no journal of metascience, metascientists have made something better than a journal: metaror.org! ;)

🤔 Which risk-of-bias tool is appropriate for a diagnosis or prognosis study? Systematic review authors frequently ask this question. There are at least 14 tools, and the choice depends on your research question and aims. ⏩ Find out, in our overview and guidance (open access): tinyurl.com/3ry6n9d2

❓ In people with HIV, is using two different rapid tests together ('parallel testing') to diagnose TB more accurate than using only one? An 'incremental' accuracy question: few Cochrane Reviews have yet addressed such questions. Adult review: shorturl.at/r9CUG Child review: shorturl.at/nSosK