1. The paper with the implausibly large effects of Omega-3 fatty acids on mental health was now retracted. A little thread on the process where @ianhussey.mmmdata.io and I was involved. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

I don't see this said enough: the widespread use of generative AI is not only making our jobs as educators harder logistically, but also emotionally. It is genuinely sad to be suspicious of students when you have spent so much time building a pedagogy based on trust and not being a cop. It sucks.

Very proud to have worked on the 2026 update to the CRediT taxonomy with @rbly.bsky.social

Two common misconceptions when repurposing data for #causalinference: 1) the target trial is an ideal trial 2) the target trial protocol can be prespecified Our new paper examines how the target trial protocol depends on the causal question AND the available data. journals.lww.com/epidem/abstr...

The @ukrepro.bsky.social just published a new primer on computational reproducibility, authored by the CR special interest group, including yours truly! I hope it's useful for introducing people to the concept and convincing resource-holders to fund efforts to improve it. zenodo.org/records/1923...

how I feel when open science initiatives choose to publish in Nature

It's not unheard of to find errors in your data after publishing it. While it's not fun when this happens, this one-pager can help guide you through the process of updating data, code, and publications when errors are found. osf.io/q4jre/files/...

My article "Data is not available upon request" was published in Meta-Psychology. Very happy to see this out! open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

The TARGET reporting guidelines for target trial emulation studies have arrived! #EpiSky #CausalSky jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

It's very human to only double check that a process is working when you get a weird result. It's also very bad practice, because sometimes your "right" result is due to a bad process and you will be misled. Social scientists (economists) do this kind of asymmetric checking. arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20069

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

I'm reviewing a lot of weak target trial emulation studies these days. Like a wolf in sheep's clothes, these adopt the language & structure of target trial emulation, but don't apply the necessary care or thought. Is this the 'doom cycle'? Where every promising new tool gets dragged into the mud.

Technical writing is hard bcs "writing is thinking" but we often should tell our story not in the order we worked. Solution? I wrote a quick post on how @quarto.org 's embed shortcodes can reframe technical writing as reproducible evidence curation www.emilyriederer.com/post/quarto-... 🧵 (1/n)

It's exceedingly hard to argue that the administration & MAHA are committed to improving nutrition when they're simultaneously cutting everything from SNAP-Ed to innovative community nutrition work - cements the perception that food dyes are public health theatre. www.healthbeat.org/newyork/2025...

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results. 👇 1/13

This article provides an overview of the current state of handling continuous variables in healthcare research. It discusses the potential limitations of assuming a linear relationship between independent and dependent variables www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Statistics/Causal Inference folks, what are your favorite papers on why VIF is bad?

At this point, I might as well -- Here's an infographic showing different ways to include age as a predictor. The top shows two extremes, just as a plain old numerical predictor (imposes linear trajectory) vs. categorical predictor (imposes nothing whatsoever). And then three solutions in between!

Fantastic article about modeling of continuous variables! ⬇️ Shameless plug: I wrote a blog about restricted cubic spline applied to nutrition and health data: didierbrassard.github.io/posts/2023/0...

There are going to be an awful lot of analyses that need redone when people finally accept that collider bias is a major issue in unweighted analyses of UKBB data

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

📄 New preprint! 
The main project of my postdoctoral work is now available (not peer-reviewed yet): Estimating the effect of adhering to #CanadaFoodGuide 2019 recommendations in older adults: a target trial emulation
 🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

I agree, the challenges to self-correcting science are real. Tried to publish a “letter to the editor” which was rejected in the end. The editor mentioned the topic of the letter wouldn’t be of interest to readers! Wouldn’t readers also be interested to learn about flaws of a published study?

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

What is ‘Open Science’? Or, how is Open Science operationalised in survey research? Come talk to me at the #metascience2025 poster session!

Update #2, RETRACTED: 15 months after we (w @ollefolke.bsky.social and @johannarickne.bsky.social ) submitted the initial comment to the Journal, we've noticed the paper was ultimately retracted. Retraction note here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Friendly #rstats package development reminder to my future self: `@inheritParams` is a nice {roxygen2} feature to help you stay DRY when writing function documentation. More here: r-pkgs.org/man.html#inh... 📦 : roxygen2.r-lib.org/index.html

basically every research paper I’ve written, minus step 6.

TIL that impact factors are even weirder than I thought! Negotiated with Clarivate?! What? I didn’t think the scientific publishing system could get any stranger!

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?" Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

Great tips to improve your R coding experience

AI is a problem for research as well as student evaluation: "we highlight a set of best practices to mitigate the risks of paper mills using AI-assisted workflows to introduce low-quality manuscripts to the scientific literature"

Shouldn't need saying, but clearly it does "Reporting guideline checklists are not quality evaluation forms: they are guidance for writing" --> onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... ...quality/risk of bias assessment is aided by transparent reporting though.

NEW PAPER: Updated CONSORT-2025 for reporting randomised trials is now available in the @bmj.com @jama.com , @thelancet.bsky.social, @plos.org and @naturemedicine.bsky.social —> www.bmj.com/content/389/... #openscience #transparency #medsky #statssky #episky

When planning for data collection, especially in longitudinal studies, first consider how that data will be used. Ask yourself: - How will we combine data for analysis? - What unique IDs will allow us to do this? - How will we name/code items to combine data? - Will our data need restructuring?

"Publications typically describe the discovery as it ideally should have happened, reporting only the evidence relevant to the proposed claims."

Inspired by a recent conversation, and by this article (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...), I have been working on a one-pager to help researchers through the process of updating published datasets if errors are ever found. I'd love any feedback!

How to deal with (multi)colinearity in a regression model? If the goal is purely to predict: even high colinearity may not matter much pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35016734/ and quick-fix solutions like PCA may do more harm than good onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Great research career advice 👇🏻

Did you know that all the fine artisanal memes from my stats lectures are available in the course repo? Reuse and remixing freely encouraged github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Avoid the shock of bad data. Tips to collect better data: cghlewis.com/blog/survey_...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words! If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance. www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

Waterfall plots present changes or differences for individual cases. While "show the data" is 👍, just a reminder that these plots don't inform about treatment response heterogeneity on their own. Here's a plot of the treatment-control differences in energy expenditure from a crossover trial.

🙏 Simple tips for recording data in spreadsheets: statsepi.substack.com/p/simple-tip...

When you prepare a dataset to share with others, ask yourself: Will other people be able to fully understand this data and be able to use it accurately based on what I've provided to them?

"data doesn't lie" The reddest of red flags that someone is full to the brim of bullshit.