Tag Archives: good science

Exploring the metrics and incentives of scientific productivity

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The pressure to publish and current incentives that reward highly-cited discoveries leads to research findings that are not reproducible and inadvertently results in the natural selection of bad science. It is difficult to encourage scientists to take effort in conducting reproducible and rigorous research without better incentives. What kinds of metrics and incentives might reward scientists for conducting sound science?

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More on regression to the mean

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Previously, we saw how regression to the mean can lead to false results. In a talk titled Regression towards the mean, or Why was Terminator III such a disappointment?, statistician Martin Bland explains this phenomenon and how it appears in different examples. The Victorian statistician Francis Galton measured the heights of parents and children and found that taller parents tended

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What does research reproducibility mean?

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Concerns about research reproducibility (or lack thereof) continue to escalate but it seems people can have quite different ideas about what research reproducibility means. In a perspectives editorial, Goodman and colleagues demonstrate concepts on reproducibility can be both precise: …reproducibility refers to the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials as

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How false findings become canonized as scientific fact when publication bias is unknown

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Scientific inquiry is the process by which new information is generated through experimental, theoretical or observational methods in order to understand the world. As inquiry progresses, some claims eventually achieve enough acceptance by the scientific community and become regarded as “fact”. The more established a fact is, the less likely it is subjected to further verification. However, poor reproducibility of

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Essay review: The importance of stupidity in scientific research

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In light of recent depressing posts on the reproducibility crisis and the natural selection of bad science, I thought it worthwhile to revisit why we actually try to do good science, despite the pressures to compromise, and what qualities good scientists possess. Some time ago, the cell biologist Martin Schwartz wrote an interesting and honest essay on why, for sincere

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