When I talk to friends or family members who do not work in academia, they have beliefs about how science works — beliefs that appear entirely sensible. Most published results are correct or at least plausible, because scientific journals are the most thorough outlets. Errors occur very rarely, and if they do, they are corrected… Read more »
A month ago, I wrote about things that bum me out in academia, and some antidotes against cynicism creep. It was actually one of my best-received blog posts, and I appreciate all the positive feedback, comments, and shares. In the last half year, we’ve had an absolutely terrible experience with a scientific journal, so let… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »