CategoryPeer Review
What Happens When Science Degenerates Into a Spoils System?
Chemistry prof Anna Krylov forces us to look at that in discouraging detail
How a Biologist Became a Casualty in the War on Reality
If evolutionary biology’s core belief is that everything human can be reduced to animal impulses, truth is merely a survival strategy. But nonsense proved more successful
Sabine Hossenfelder Gets Canceled. A Physicist Responds
Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon offers some further thoughts on the theoretical physicist’s ejection from the Munich Center
Will “Citation Justice” Be Fair to Science?
Should scientists cite sources for the purposes of social justice or should they cite for information purposes alone?
When Physicists Clash Over an Allegedly Pointless Universe…
… we end up finding out how much current research appears to be an elaborate waste of public funds
Scientist Sleuths Detect Significant Use of AI in Journal Papers
The researchers found that, after chatbots (LLMs) became available, writing styles shifted from content words to more “stylistic and flowery” word choices
Journal Article Ignores Medical Objections to Puberty Blockers
Allowing an author to ignorecontrary evidence and increasing doubts about puberty blockers, etc., undermines New England Journal of Medicine’s purpose in being
University Science War: Ideas vs “Dollars per Net Square Footage”
Katalin Karikó, obscure and mistreated at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Nobel Prize. Shouldn’t we have some questions?
AI Peer Review Called “Inevitable” by Some, “Disaster” by Others
The whole debate raises a question: How much original thought goes into peer review anyway? And what purpose does it ultimately serve?
Fallout From Alzheimer Research Failures: Does Anything Work?
Other research suggests that treating poor oral health, vision loss, and hearing loss might delay or reduce the effects of cognitive decline
New Science Journal Strives for Openness, Fairness, In Peer Review
Skeptics worry that the new journal "will be used to sow doubt about scientific consensus"
Cancel Culture Dissected by One of Its Victims
Researchers are beginning to study the sociology of Woke mobs demanding the firing or silencing of whoever vexes them — with some interesting results
Scandal! Science Journal Busts Allegedly Bogus Neurological Science
If these leading dementia studies’ images are indeed falsified, many years of follow-up research by others may have been wasted
The Government-Debt Tipping Point Is Nonsense
There are serious problems with the economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff, whose recommendations were widely followed
How Science Can Slowly Morph Into Junk. Or not.
Science can become entangled in many things — politics and the self-interest of funding sources, for example — and chatbots will likely make things worse
The Cancel Culture Mob Comes for the Psychologists
The response “It’s complicated,” chosen by nearly half of psychology profs, is a roundabout confession of cowardice in the face of mobs threatened by findings they hope to stifle
Don’t Believe in “International Community”? You’re Hardly Human!
Who said that? Not a streetcorner doomsday crank. No, it’s the editor of a highly respected medical journal
Is Psychology Heading for Another Big Replication Crisis?
The use of Amazon’s MTurk in survey research risks a second scandal in which findings are low quality and can’t be replicated, critics warn