Category Archives: Things gone wrong

Zombie theories: why so many false ideas stick around

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 »

Scientific publishers *not* adding value

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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 »

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 »

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 »

Becoming a journal editor in 15 minutes: a 3-step tutorial

To boost your academic career, early career researchers should consider picking up at least one associate editor position for a scientific journal. After all, spending countless hours on administrative duties will get you a long way in science. Below I provide a 15-minute 3-step tutorial on how you can easily do that, based on my… Read more »