A non-self-correcting science
While I'm all for a bit of triumphalism when some component of conventional publication vis-à-vis scientific research – like pre-publication anonymous peer review – fails, and fails publicly, I sp…
peer review
25 posts
The costs of correction
I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled 'Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms', it discussed the implications…
A caveat for peer-review
Now that more researchers are finding more holes in the study in The Lancet, which claimed hydroxychloroquine – far from being a saviour of people with COVID-19 – actually harms them, I wonder where t…
Poor journalism is making it harder for preprints
There have been quite a few statements by various scientists on Twitter who, in pointing to some preprint paper's untenable claims, point to the manuscript's identity as a preprint paper as we…
Distracting from the peer-review problem
From an article entitled ‘The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research‘ published by Reuters: A Reuters analysis found that at least 153 studies – including epidemiological papers, genetic ana…
A trumpet for Ramdev
The Print published an article entitled 'Ramdev’s Patanjali does a ‘first’, its Sanskrit paper makes it to international journal' on February 5, 2020. Excerpt: In a first, international scien…
The scientist as inadvertent loser
Twice this week, I'd had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one o…
To see faces where there are none
This week in "neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they're doing": a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and…
The cycle
Is it just me or does everyone see a self-fulfilling prophecy here? https://twitter.com/nature/status/1192129029924634625 For a long time, and assisted ably by the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, rese…
Confused thoughts on embargoes
Seventy! That's how many observatories around the world turned their antennae to study the neutron-star collision that LIGO first detected. So I don't know why the LIGO Collaboration, and Natu…
A conference's peer-review was found to be sort of random, but whose fault is it?
It's not a good time for peer-review. Sure, if you've been a regular reader of Retraction Watch, it's never been a good time for peer-review. But aside from that, the process has increasin…
R&D in China and India
"A great deal of the debate over globalization of knowledge economies has focused on China and India. One reason has been their rapid, sustained economic growth. The Chinese economy has averaged…