"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?" The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

Holiday

Rather than investing in the energy that "will never kill us or never run out" (Will Self) our state government is pouring money into coal. A sad short-term gamble to win votes.

Was a preprint, now a paper. Our experiment on researchers preferences for published papers. Disappointingly, the journal impact factor still dominates, and even worse, some authors are willing to sacrifice their results for a higher impact factor. www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docum...

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited? Version of record at @elife.bsky.social. Thorough and useful peer review - who needs and impact factor?! Links to paper and code/data ⬇️ 📄https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/108748 💻https://github.com/agbarnett/cited_reviewers

Bloom

At a repair cafe getting a music stand fixed and it is an absolute joy of positivity and community spirit.

🎈 Time flies! Exactly one year ago today @rorinstitute.bsky.social and @aimosinc.bsky.social launched MetaROR, a platform to publish metaresearch through the publish-review-curate approach. Over the course of the year, we published 28 articles reviewed by 59 different reviewers. [1/3]

Bloom!

At the past two AIMOS conferences, we have had a free public lecture for the local community. #AIMOS2025 follows suit! Join us for Ivan Oransky's public lecture: events.humanitix.com/public-talk-... but do so soon, seats are limited!

International Research Integrity Conference: it's underway in Sydney. Opening Sunday workshop by James Heathers on Forensic Metascience. Full program available: researchintegrityconf.com Thank you sleuths!

New paper: we validated the Clinical Frailty Scale for predicting 90-day mortality in frail older adults. We show that the scale's predictive utility is low, but argue that mortality risk shouldn't be what catalyses end-of-life care discussions anyway doi.org/10.1136/bmjo... #statsky #medsky #episky

Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social

The Qld police are catching fewer badly behaving motorists, but yet they still find time to fine cyclists for speeding on the bike path. I saw four officers doing this a few months ago. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

Have increased capacity for this December INSPECT-SR online training workshop following a successful 1st event today. Book here: www.trybooking.com/uk/FKHV

Glad to share our full paper on why deployed clinical prediction models should not discard predicted risks in favour of thresholds with @rexwp.bsky.social and @aidybarnett.bsky.social now up on @jclinepi.bsky.social. A brief explainer (1/4): #statsky #rstats authors.elsevier.com/a/1m1D83BcJQ...

🎲 Working in a bingo hall as a boy, #AusHSI Prof @aidybarnett.bsky.social is well-versed in the game of chance. In @significancemag.bsky.social, learn about the #lottery for #researchfunding he now runs for the @britishacademy.bsky.social and how it works. 🔗 bit.ly/3J7689t | 🔓 bit.ly/47HTlDH

My dog loves sleeping in a pot plant

The dark truth behind FormatMyPaper.com

With only about 10 spots left, #AIMOS2025 will almost surely sell out this year. Register now to make sure you don't miss out! aimos-inc.github.io/aimos.confer...

Some real fake news! Paper mills are creating fake authors who can then serve as fake reviewers. The illustration of the fake reviewer sitting at their desk is excellent. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

👉Also Sorbonne bsky.app/profile/sorb... pulled out of 'THE' University Ranking 👇 Important step in times of massive, systematic gaming by Universities, being a main incentive for Hyperprolific Publishing, Citation Cartels, Paper Mills & Junk Science! #researchintegrity, #Chemsky, #CompChemSky

Is it fair for grant reviewers — who are often our colleagues — to judge the legitimacy of career breaks due to personal circumstances? go.nature.com/48yaJvF

A good argument for preprinting everything here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I once worked in a bingo hall and saw the joy of people winning money at random. Now I randomise academics in the serious business of who wins research funding. With funding lotteries growing in popularity, I reflect on how to run them and the lessons from bingo. academic.oup.com/jrssig/artic...

I think a lot about the general lack of statistical competence. Misspelling the great John Tukey's name as Turkey may seem harmless, but I can't think of how anyone whose is serious about statistics would do this.

2025. (not just cancer lit....) Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? A large language model scans abstracts and titles for signs that an article was produced by a 'paper-mill' company. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Lotteries may be fair in theory, but new research shows people prefer expert committees to decide who gets scarce medical treatment.

Free data resources in science are having the shit mined out of them to produce X,000's of bullshit papers. What should we do? (Warning: I sat on this draft for too long, and publishers are already doing some of it. That's what I get for engaging with the news.) open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

At last, a simple diagram that explains random forests. Go forth and make random diagrams, I mean random forests. From www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejo...

It's 2025.723 and scientists are still putting too many decimal places in their results.

When the zombie apocalypse starts in Brisbane

Peer reviewers are more likely to recommend accepting papers that cite their work — my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/policy/publi... @aidybarnett.bsky.social

“I still yearn for the good old days…” From the latest Private Eye, out now.

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Reviewers are more likely to approve manuscripts if authors agree to cite their work than those who don't get cited. Thanks to @aidybarnett.bsky.social, @balazsaczel.bsky.social and @econfeld.bsky.social for chatting with me for this story! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Don't miss out!

Sadly familiar story on the ABC over government interference in scientific results www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08.... I fully support the statistician (Adrian Baddeley) for quitting.

Retraction by ‪@mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social‬ of a paper in which a University of West Florida professor appears to have photoshopped his model airplane into a photo of a NASA wind tunnel mdpi.com/2226-4310/7/... pubpeer.com/publications...

If there's anyone listening from the Global Burden of Disease, your data is being used for trash studies and your reputation is heading down the toilet.

Care about #reproducibility in research & publishing? Join this webinar on Aug 27th, jointly organised by @aimosinc.bsky.social & @ausrepro.bsky.social on statistical reproducibility with @michelenuijten.bsky.social & @tomhardwicke.bsky.social Free - register here qut.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

A new preprint showing strong evidence of peer reviewers engaging in transactional peer review as some only approved a manuscript after requesting and then getting cited osf.io/preprints/os...

The NHMRC has today released a Good Institutional Practice Guide. I'm biased, because I was involved in its development, but I think it's a great document that the Australian research community really needs. www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/pub...

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Once upon a time, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched. And now, 15 years and 6,700 posts later, that work seems more important than ever. Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch.

As a statistician, I am getting very "First they came" vibes here, but this is just rot and bonkers. I remember campaigning for Andreas Georgiou when the Greek government pulled a similar trick. I know the international stats community will rally together again, but will anything change?

Almost all my bug bears in one paragraph

Two thoughtful and rapid reviews, MetaROR is the best place for meta-research.

I’m thinking of starting a new field of research that compares lettuces. Its name? Cos-effectiveness.

Monday morning mood