Open Science

Prior probability and reproducibility

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Physicist Carl Sagan famously said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think its useful to extend this to the distinctly less elegant “surprising findings are less likely to be true, and thus require a higher standard of evidence.” I started thinking more about what influences the reliability of a scientific result when analyses of my post-doc data weren’t lining up with published findings from other studies of the same species.

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An iconic finding in behavioral ecology fails to reproduce

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Just how reproducible are studies in ecology and evolutionary biology? We don’t know precisely, but a new case study in the journal Evolution shows that even textbook knowledge can be unreliable. Daiping Wang, Wolfgang Forstmeier, and co-authors have convinced me of the unreliability of an iconic finding in behavioral ecology, and I hope their results brings our field one step closer to a systematic assessment of reproducibility.

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A conversation - Where do ecology and evolution stand in the broader ‘reproducibility crisis’ of science?

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] In this post, I float some ideas that I’ve had about the ‘reproducibility crisis’ as it is emerging in ecology and evolutionary biology, and how this emergence may or may not differ from what is happening in other disciplines, in particular psychology. Two other experts on this topic (Fiona Fidler and David Mellor) respond to my ideas, and propose some different ideas as well.

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Reproducibility Project - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] The problem As you probably already know, researchers in some fields are finding that it’s often not possible to reproduce others’ findings. Fields like psychology and cancer biology have undertaken large-scale coordinated projects aimed at determining how reproducible their research is. There has been no such attempt in ecology and evolutionary biology. A starting point Earlier this year Bruna, Chazdon, Errington and Nosek wrote an article citing the need to start this process by reproducing foundational studies.

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Why ‘MORE’ published research findings are false

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] In a classic article titled “Why most published research findings are false”, John Ioannidis explains 5 main reasons for just that. These reasons are largely related to large ‘false positive reporting probabilities’ (FPRP) in most studies, and ‘researcher degrees of freedom’, facilitating the practice as such ‘p-hacking’. If you aren’t familiar with these terms (FPRP, researcher degrees of freedom, and p-hacking), please read Tim Parker and his colleagues’ paper.

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Replication - step 1 in PhD research

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Here are a few statements that won’t surprise anyone who knows me. I think replication has the potential to be really useful. I think we don’t do nearly enough of it and I think our understanding of the world suffers from this rarity. In this post I try to make the case for the utility of replication based on an anecdote from my own scientific past.

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Is overstatement of generality an Open Science issue?

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] I teach an undergraduate class in ecology and every week or two I have the students in that class read a paper from the primary literature. I want them to learn to extract important information and to critically evaluate that information. This involves distinguishing evidence from inference and identifying assumptions that link the two. I’m just scratching the surface of this process here, but the detail I want to emphasize in this post is that I ask the students to describe the scope of the inference.

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Ecologists and evolutionary biologists can and should pre-register their research

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] I wrote a draft of this post a few weeks ago, and now seems like a good time for it to see the light of day given the great new pre-print just posted on OSF Preprints by Brian Nosek, David Mellor, and co-authors. They describe the utility of pre-registration across a variety of circumstances. I do something similar here, though I focus on ecology and evolutionary biology and I don’t try to be as thorough as Nosek et al.

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Ecological Society of America Ignite Session on Replication in Ecology

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Fiona Fidler and Tim Parker organized an Ignite session on Replication in Ecology at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting 2017 in Portland, U.S.A a few weeks ago. Ignite sessions start with a series of 5 minute talks on a similar topic that are followed by a panel discussion. At Fiona and Tim’s session more than 50 attendees listed to talks by Fiona Fidler, Clint Kelly, Kim LaPierre, David Mellor, Emery Boose, and Bill Michener.

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