Little blogpost reporting an analysis of recent (2021-2025) retractions of highly-cited papers in relation to #PubPeer comments. deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-... #retractions #publishing

Meer van dit soort reportages graag, over de complexiteit van straatoverlast. Door @rikkuiper.bsky.social en @lisa-1804.bsky.social. www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/j...

You can sign up until January 23 for the free Paul Meehl Graduate School workshop on Scientific Criticism and Peer review taught by René Bekkers. It promises to be an extremely interesting day, so do join us in Eindhoven on January 30th! paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/cr...

Conclusion so far: Statisticians probably don't complain if conventional CI is reported, even though they think it shouldn't when questioned. Nobody is actually saying 'yes', or 'no, always report this instead'.

Incredible work by these authors to continue to write to the BMJ to get this paper retracted!

Really curious what eveyone's take is on this. Please tag people that have an opinion. @kertviele.bsky.social @statberry.bsky.social @statsepi.bsky.social @stephensenn.bsky.social @numbersman77.bsky.social @erik-van-zwet.bsky.social

Trial statisticians! Should RCT pubs report conventional 95%-confidence intervals if they did a futility interim and continued the trial? No sampling distribution can possibly be Gaussian if randomly better than average data reaches study completion while randomly worse than average doesn't.

My New Year's resolution exactly! Julia has some great advice here: bsky.app/profile/ding... And I want to second @tsawallis.bsky.social's reminder of Diamond Open Access Journal of Robustness Reports (scipost.org/JRobustRep).

A hope for 2026 is that this perspective piece with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social & @deevybee.bsky.social will serve as a template for others who are similarly frustrated with with exaggerated claims and double speak around so much of research. It's ok to point out that the emperor has no clothes!

New Year, new #Bluesky user? Interested in #ResearchIntegrity & looking to connect with others on @bsky.app? Here are two #StarterPacks covering people connected with research integrity & there's still space so please share suggestions or wave to be added! go.bsky.app/QN5upY5 go.bsky.app/5NJ9Z4N

Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...

This is fantastic! Go read everything Saloni writes!

Yeah. And before this, half of reviewers were submitting trivial, short reviews that either said "looks good to me" or "this is excrement". This is why reviews should be part of the public record for any paper. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Surprised by the many bullshit citations first time looking into (chemical engineering) papers on toxicity of Bisphenol A. 708 citations of a paper starting with sentence: Water is amongst the most prominent resources in the universe (Karimi-Maleh et al., 2020c, 2021a, 2021b) tinyurl.com/2pv6ke2m

Six journals rejected their commentary. Six! Journal system is really lousy in facilitating proper scientific process. @ploederl.bsky.social Diamond OA journal @robustnessreports.bsky.social would be a perfect fit. But I can see why you tried psychiatry journals to reach the audience. Catch22.

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

#stats PSA: In January, I will host a workshop on "e-value". If you care about confounding, causal inference, and sensitivity analyses this is *not* for you; you are thinking of "E-value". Different thing. Different workshop. Isn't stats naming fun? What are ppl's thoughts on either of these two?

Hey @mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social - I understand you have a policy requiring pre-registration of clinical trials, yet you printed this one, registered after the fact. Why? Seems like it should be an easy policy to enforce. www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17...

Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions. 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/...

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

The scandal of medical research still failing to adopt the Registered Report format for trial publications. Great example of failure to weed out Questionable Research Practices by clinical trial register (preregistration)+ journal review + multiple systematic reviews + guideline development process

BTW, I can recommend to get familiar with this one: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... It helps to judge the trustworthiness of RCTs

We did a thing. 😬

While a lot of people might focus on how this got published in the first place (rightfully) I wonder if we shouldn't also consider this a pretty huge win for BMJ's data sharing policy.

Can we improve peer review? We think we can! Check out an experiment I helped with as part of @solvingforsci.bsky.social 's mission to make science better. And if you don't want to read the whole bioRxiv manuscript, here's an overview of the main findings: solvingfor.org/news-posts-d...

Peter Doshi, who lead the RIAT initiative, writes about the recent legal actions on the 2001 publication of Study 329. Never heard about Study 329 or RIAT? Then I recommend reading this to understand the darker sides of EBM. www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Given increased use of single pivotal trials supporting FDA approval of new drugs & biologics, our study findings indicate a need for greater clarity & transparency by reviewers & sponsors on what evidence was considered to be confirmatory when approving drugs based on a single pivotal trial (7/8)

Radboud researchers René Aquarius @deadneanderthals.bsky.social and Kim Wever were about to embark on a literature review project when they noticed several odd things that made them stop in their tracks, then change the course of their study entirely.

Surprisingly, I4R has never been contacted by any of the authors' universities/funders. This is disappointing given that we documented irregularities in 10+ lengthy reports. That's easily 300 pages of data irregularities.

Fascinating graph shows the estimated total mass of all the mammals living on Earth. In 1850, it was evenly divided between wildlife and humans + domesticated animals. Today, humans and their livestock account for about 95% of the total. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We just started a website highlighting articles that would make good candidates for a Robustness Report. 🌐 Check out the website: www.journalofrobustnessreports.org 📄 Read our first blog post: www.journalofrobustnessreports.org/inaugural-po...

Against Publishing: universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/... Preprints are read, shared, and cited, yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. I argue that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping of what counts as published.

Yesterday with the META/e group at Eindhoven we discussed the draft of the new Dutch Code for Research Integrity: www.nwo-i.nl/en/news/2025... It is great to see how much transparency and FAIR data and code will become the default expectation to adhere to research integrity.

Slordige Nieuwsuur items zetten de wetenschap onder druk. @www.sjamadriaan.nl heeft helemaal gelijk: "Zo kun je ook prima redeneren dat juist een podium geven aan Baudet, of andere notoire lariekoekgroottrutters, beperkend werkt voor de academische vrijheid." www.sjamadriaan.nl/p/wetenschap...

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

Outstanding tutorial on Game-theoretic Statistics and Sequential Anytime-Valid Inference by Aaditya Ramdas at #icml-2025. Slides at stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/icm...

"Ending publication bias: A values-based approach to surface null and negative results" Paper out today in PLoS Medicine by many of us who would like to see publication bias reduced or eliminated. Especially happy that Registered Reports got shout-outs. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Eens! Net lid geworden. Juist in deze tijd moeten we media steunen die nog wel tegen radicaal-rechts durven in te gaan. Dus hup, abonneer op @ftm.nl, @groene.nl, @oneworld.nl, @vn.nl en/of @decorrespondent.nl (En andere tips welkom.)

Want to be able to start micro-editing on Wikipedia in a few minutes – and know why you could be very glad you did? Then my new post @plos.org is just what you need! absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/09/21/w... #Wikipedia

Writing separately, but, I'd like to share a brief honest reflection on the experience of writing our paper on climate change health impact attribution, which is to date probably the hardest and most frustrating project of 100+ I've published in 15 years as a scientist.

Time is running out to register for our pre-symposium workshop and Meta Research Symposium event at Paul Meehl Graduate School Check the information and registration links below: paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/

To Prime Minister Netanyahu, an open letter from 23 economists at universities in the US and Europe. We urge you to read it. drive.google.com/file/d/1D_Sv...

J. D. Bernal in 1939 discussing how graduate students (only a thing from 1917 in the UK) are evaluated based on number and bulk, the publication pressure stifling originality, and filling the literature with useless papers.

Really nice to visit #GreenKayak during our stay in Bergen, Norway. Quite valuable trash in the Fjord. A great day to paddle and to be useful for cleaner oceans.

“In their analysis, the researchers excluded the last birth of each woman to reduce the influence of parental choice — for instance, some people choose to stop having children once they have both boys and girls.” Any analysis conditioning on number of children suffers from accumulation bias.

Given the importance of the topic, we might have pursued a journal with greater notoriety—but we prioritized BMC Medicine for its rigorous publication standards, as it is one of the few general medical journals—if not the only one—to offer registered reports.

Excellent! Journals should implement and test these tools as soon as possible! (While I don’t mind checking a clinical trial registration when reviewing, I can understand reviewers that do since I get annoyed when asked to check with a reporting guideline (which is boring).)

Laten we inderdaad een jubelton invoeren, maar dan net een beetje anders. 1. Iedereen die een huis koopt en er nog geen heeft, krijgt een ton van de overheid. 2. Dat financieren we dan door de overwaarde te belasten van de mensen die hun huis verkopen. 1/4