Category Archives: Publishing

Antidotes to cynicism creep in academia

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This is one of these blog posts that doesn’t read well if you stop halfway. First, I provide evidence that academia can look pretty broken: there is low-quality work everywhere you look, the peer-review system has long outlived its utility, and academic publishing is a dumpster fire. Add considerable work pressure, the publish-or-perish culture, and… Read more »

Using GPT-3 to search for scientific “references”

I have been playing around with GPT-3 and its chatbot in previous weeks, and found it fascinating. GPT-3——the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3——is a deep learning language model developed by OPEN AI and produces human-like text. Some amazing use cases have already been explored. Here is an example where Denny Borsboom interrogated GPT-3 about assumptions of… Read more »

Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not

In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post, summarizing our journey in trying to understand what data Elsevier collects; what data Elsevier has collected on us two specifically; and trying to… Read more »

APA chief publishing officer: ignore paper removal request

On December 24th 2019, I received a legal threat by the American Psychological Association to remove one of my papers from my personal website. Similar requests have been received by other colleagues recently. I appealed the request, and have now heard back from APA’s Chief Publishing Officer that I can ignore the request because “it… Read more »

SIPS18 collected resources, and reflections of a SIPS virgin

The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) hosted their third annual conference in Grand Rapids MI a few days ago. This blog provides a summary and some collected resources for those who couldn’t join, and a few reflections (praise & challenges) of a SIPS virgin. SIPS: an introduction I will not repeat all… Read more »

7 Sternberg papers: 351 references, 161 self-citations

Robert Sternberg, editor-in-chief of Perspectives on Psychological Science (PoPS), published 7 papers in PoPS in the last 2 years. The papers contain 351 references; 161 of these references (46%) are self-citations. This pattern doesn’t seem limited to his papers published in Perspectives: 51 of the 66 references (77%) in a recent paper on intelligence are… Read more »

Academia: trapped in the upside down of publishing

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TL;DR: this post explains the basics of academic publishing; highlights several severe problems; discusses the recent activities of the American Psychology Association (APA) targeting psychological researchers; suggests some ways forward; and ends with an unexpected plot twist: an APA journal invited me to join their editorial board while I was writing this APA-critical blog post…. Read more »