Preregistration. Registered Reports. Open sharing of data and materials. Preprints. Getting rid of journals. Stopping the practice of evaluating scientists based on the Impact Factor of the journal in which they publish. Getting rid of p-values. Less competition & more collaboration. More team science. More replications. Less emphasis on novelty…

I’ve been thinking that it’s a bit strange that we hire scientists for permanent positions based on their past contributions, as opposed to their potential to make contributions in the future. In plenty of other domains, we don’t make this mistake. When we decide whether to buy a house, we…

When scientists submit their research to academic journals for publication, journals typically ask them to recommend peer reviewers. An analogous process often occurs for grant applications to science funders, where applicants are asked to nominate potential reviewers for their grant proposal. …

Daniel Nettle — Final post of the 6-part series, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). Poor old psychology: looking silly again. It wanted to be seen as a real science, hypothetico-deductive model and all. First it looked a bit silly when most of the ‘effects’ that constituted the alleged support for its…

Minhua Yan — Part 5 of the 6-part series, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). Hopefully you are now convinced that formal models are useful tools to help scientists understand the world. …

Willem Frankenhuis, Karthik Panchanathan & Paul Smaldino — Part 4 of the 6-part series, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). Many social scientists do not consider formal models a useful tool in theory construction. They might defend this position by arguing that “formal models make assumptions that are too simplistic, too unrealistic, and too arbitrary.” Instead, they…

Part 3 of 6, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.19688.39688 In Part 1, I covered the misconception that models are mainly useful if you want to generate precise predictions. In fact, models have many uses, a key one being that models promote transparency. In Part 2, I covered…

Part 2 of the 6-part series, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31851.87841 The simple observation that most models are oversimplified, approximate, incomplete, and in other ways false gives little reason for using them. Their widespread use suggests that there must be other reasons. - William Wimsatt¹ A common…

Part 1 of 6, Modeling for metascientists (and other interesting people). http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.11024.53767 I often hear the argument that theories in psychology are immature because they don’t make “risky” predictions (that is, predictions that are likely, given the theory, but unlikely, absent the theory). …