Well, 2025 has come an gone. Welcome to 2026. I am sure I will continue to offer my periodic posts as time permits. Some good news toward the end of last year was that a paper of mine was accepted for publication, and it will be published early this year. I know I rarely choose high-impact journal outlets these days and that is on purpose. I'm less interested in climbing whatever ladder we scholars are supposed to climb and more interested in getting the information out there. If it is worthwhile to someone, it will get cited. If not, that's life. The main thing is to continue to march to the beat of my own drummer.
One thing I want to quickly circle back to is a paper I have discussed before here and here. I noticed recently that the journal that published the paper issued a corrigendum. That corrigendum featured the updated table I referred to earlier. Unfortunately, that means that the paper still has a problem or two and that is the problem I noted in my previous post: at least two of the standard deviations reported in that table apparently cannot be true (see previous post for my screenshots of some SPRITE runs), which is a meta-analyst's nightmare. I've double-checked and triple-checked those standard deviations as well as I possibly can, making the assumption that the authors used the Likert scales they reported for each DV and that each DV was a single-item measure (the authors provide no information to the contrary and there is no archived data to reference). It is possible that one or both assumptions I made are incorrect either due to typos on the part of the authors (regarding the Likert scales) or the potential of the DVs being multi-item questionnaires. However, until I am corrected, I think I will stick with my initial assessment. Something is still regrettably off about the data analyses reported in this paper and I am deeply concerned.
If there are any new developments, I shall let you know. In the meantime, stay tuned.
