Open Science

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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