Class 10: Scientific Publishing and the Replication Crisis

Slides

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Readings

I don’t expect you to read all these, but in case you’re curious, here are some papers mentioned in class:

  • Open Science Collaboration (2015)

  • Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011)

  • Gould et al. (2025)

  • Turner et al. (2008)

For a refresher on hypothesis testing and statistical power, you could can have a look at the begging of chapter 2 in Lakens (2022)

Since the lecture did not really cover this, if you want to know what’s wrong with scientific publishing, this old (but gold!) article of the Guardian is a good read. It’s also available as a podcast.

Data

Assignment

No assignment for this session 🎉

References

Gould, Elliot, Hannah S. Fraser, Timothy H. Parker, Shinichi Nakagawa, Simon C. Griffith, Peter A. Vesk, Fiona Fidler, et al. 2025. “Same Data, Different Analysts: Variation in Effect Sizes Due to Analytical Decisions in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.” BMC Biology 23 (1): 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-024-02101-x.
Lakens, Daniël. 2022. Improving Your Statistical Inferences. Zenodo. https://lakens.github.io/statistical_inferences/.
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349 (6251). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716.
Simmons, Joseph P., Leif D. Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn. 2011. “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” Psychological Science 22 (11): 1359–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632.
Turner, Erick H., Annette M. Matthews, Eftihia Linardatos, Robert A. Tell, and Robert Rosenthal. 2008. “Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy.” New England Journal of Medicine 358 (3): 252–60. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa065779.