I am used to confused interactions, likely because I get along better with dogs and kids than I do with adults. But that is not what Nieuwenhuis et al. had in mind when they surveyed 513 articles relating to behavior, cognitive function or brain imaging from leading journals (Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Journal of Neurosience). What they were looking
Read more
For better or worse, our mind plays tricks on us: we are prone to cognitive biases and logical fallacies. These biases don’t impact how do the laundry or prepare supper, although I may convince myself that I always intended to make a galette despite having the cookbook open at the soufflé page. Unfortunately, these same biases and fallacies can wreck
Read more
Scientific impact is a difficult thing to measure. Nevertheless, a variety of indexes and metrics have been created that attempt to quantify it. Many of these measures are based on citations: the number of times a scientific paper is referenced by another scientific paper. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear what these citation-based metrics actually reflect, nor is it clear
Read more
Computer code is used to analyse data in research studies across many fields including epidemiology, biomedical science, computational biology and physics. Many findings now depend on such analyses. What role do journals play in ensuring transparency and reproducibility of computer code used to generate research findings? How might this fit in with our efforts, as scientists, to reduce errors in
Read more
In my last two posts, I talked about my experience with errors in science. Errors are part of life, and they are part of science. Without errors we can’t learn. However, if we hide away our data, our analysis and, if relevant, our code, errors will not be noticed. They and the data and results they generate will become part
Read more
When we try to interpret findings from a study, we often like to understand whether an effect (of a treatment or test condition) might be different in subjects with different characteristics. If there was substantial variability among subjects, this may have masked a treatment effect in a select few. How can we understand effects in select groups of subjects that
Read more