Wednesday, September 26, 2018

One of my projects...

is not a project in the normal sense of the term. I have been interested in the work of a specific lab for a while. Some of the findings reported in an article I stumbled upon a couple years back did not make sense to me, and I found extracting effect sizes I needed for a project I was then in the midst of updating to be rather frustrating and annoying. More recently, I stumbled upon some work by this same lab (I was looking for fresh articles that are relevant to my primary research areas), and noticed the same basic pattern of reporting and apparent reporting mistakes. I've been sharing that publicly on Twitter, and so have others. A number of us sort of stumbled on to a pattern of poor reporting in articles produced by this lab in both predatory journals and legitimate journals. Thankfully there are tools one can use post-publication to examine findings (I've been partial to statcheck), and those have been, shall we say, illuminating. This is not the sort of stuff I'll put on a CV. It won't count towards research as my institution defines it, nor will most folks end up really caring. What can be done is to clean up a portion of a literature that is in desperate need of cleaning up - to correct the record wherever possible. I am often astounded and appalled at what manages to slip through peer review. We really need to do better.

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