Everything Hertz

We discuss whether preprint servers and journals should require author identity verification for submitting manuscripts. This would probably speed up the submission process, but is this worth the potential downsides? We also discuss the similarities and differences between academia and professional sports and a weird case of author identity theft.

Other links

• The BJKS podcast https://bjks.buzzsprout.com

Socia...

Dan and James chat about a a new 'pop-up journal' concept for addressing specific research questions. They also answer a listener question from a journal grammar editor and discuss a new PNAS article on paper mills

Links

• The pop-up journal
• The episode where Dan's wife went into labor
• The PNAS paper mill paper
• A blog post from the PNAS paper lead author, Reese Richardson.
• The Nature piece on the paper

Social m...

James and Dan discuss James' newly funded 'Medical Evidence Project', whose goal is to find questionable medical evidence that is contaminating treatment guidelines.

Links

• James' blog post from last year
• The carthorse child blog post
• The blog post announcing the project
• A write up in Nature about the project

Other links

• Dan on Bluesky
• James on Bluesky
• Everything Hertz on Bluesky

Citation

Quin...

We chat about two new studies that took different approaches for evaluating the impact of paying reviewers on peer review speed and quality.

Links

• James' 450 movement proposal
• The paper from Critical Care Medicine
• The preprint from Biology Open

Other links

• Dan on Bluesky
• James on Bluesky
• Everything Hertz on Bluesky

Citation
Quintana, D. S., & Heathers, J. (2025, April 2). 190: What hap...

Dan and James discuss a recent piece that proposes a post-publication review process, which is triggered by citation counts. They also cover how an almetrics trigger could be alternatively used for a more immediate post-publication critique.

Links

• The Chonicle piece by Andrew Gelman and Andrew King [Free to read with email registration]
• The paper by Peder Isager and collegues on how to decide what papers we should r...

Dan and James discuss a recent editorial which argues that double-blind peer review is detrimental to scientific integrity.

Links

• The editorial from Christopher Mebane: https://doi.org/10.1093/etojnl/vgae046

Other links
Everything Hertz on Bluesky

• Dan on Bluesky
• James on Bluesky
• Everything Hertz on Bluesky

Support us on Patreon and get bonus stuff!

• $1 per month: A 20% discount on Ever...

We chat about the events that started the replication crisis in psychology and Dorothy Bishop's recent resignation from the Royal Society

Links

• The resignation blogpost from Dorothy Bishop
• The bluesky post from Sarah Weiten that asked the question, "If you had to cite an event that opened the "replication crisis" era, what would you point to?"
• The "Year of Horrors" paper from Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

Other links<...

In this episode we chat about a Nordic approach for evaluating the journal quality and how we should be teaching undergraduates to evaluate journal and article quality

Links

• The Norwegian journal register
• The Finnish journal register
• Episode 22, where we played "Pokemon or Cholesterol medication?"

Other links
Everything Hertz on social media

• Dan on twitter
• James on twitter
• Everything Hertz on twitt...

We discuss the recent retraction of a paper that reported the effects of rigour-enhancing practices on replicability. We also cover James' new estimate that 1 out of 7 scientific papers are fake.

Links

• The story about data integrity concerns in 130 women’s health papers
• James' new preprint with the estimate that 1 out of 7 scientific papers are fake
• The retracted paper in Nature Human Behavior by Protzko and cowork...

Open access articles have democratized the availability of scientific research, but are author-paid publication fees undermining the quality of science?

The preprint by Morgan and Smaldino - https://osf.io/preprints/osf/3ez9v
Paul Smaldino's text book - Modeling social behavior

Main edisode takeaways (AI-assisted summary)

• There is a wide variability in the quality of papers published in gold open access journa...

Dan and James discuss a paper describing a journal editor's efforts to receive data from authors who submitted papers with results that seemed a little too beautiful to be true

Main edisode takeaways (AI generated summary)

• This editorial on the reproducibility crisis emphasizes the importance of providing raw data in scientific publications and highlights the need for transparency and accountability in the research ...

Dan and James answer a listener question on what practices should the behavioural sciences borrow (and ignore) from other research fields.

Here are the main takeaways:

• Keeping laboratory records and using electronic lab management software is beneficial practices biology that would benefit the behavioral sciences
• The rate of pre-registration of meta-analysis in psychology is low, unlike other fields, which have a hi...

We discuss how following citation chains in psychology can often lead to unexpected places, and how this can contribute to unreplicable findings. We also discuss why team science has taken longer to catch on in psychology compared to other research fields.

• Here is the preprint that we mentioned authored by Andrew Gelman and Nick Brown - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ekmdf
• Our episode with Nick Brown - https://ev...

Dan and James discuss why innovation in scientific publishing is so hard, an emerging consortium peer review model, and a recent replication of the 'refilling soup bowl' study.

Other things they cover and links:

• Which studies should we spend time replicating?
• The business models of for-profit scientific publishers
• How many tacos can you buy with the money it costs to publish open access in Nature?
• The original soup...

Dan and James discuss how scientific research often neglects the importance of maintenance and long-term access for scientific tools and resources.

Other things they cover:

• Should there be an annual limit on publications (even if this were somehow possible)?
• The downsides of PhD by publication
• The Gates Foundation's new Open Access policy

Other links
Everything Hertz on social media

• Dan on twitter
• ...

Dan and James discuss the Retractobot service, which emails authors about papers they've cited that have been retracted. What should authors do if they discover a paper they've cited has been retracted after they published their paper?

Other things they chat about

• A listener question about including examiner's comments in thesis
• The different types of retractions and thier impact
• Why aren't versioning systems more c...

We discuss two recent plagiarism cases, one you've probably heard about and another that you probably haven't heard about if you're outside Norway. We also chat about the parallels between plagiarism and sports doping—would people reconsider academic dishonesty if they were reminded that future technology may catch them out?

Here are some of the takeaways from the episode (generated with the help of AI):

• Plagiarism ...

We chat about a paper on the invisible workload of open science and why academics are so bad at tracking their workloads.

This episode was originally recorded in May 2023 in a hotel room just before our live recording of Episode 169, which is why we refer to the paper as a 'new' paper near the start of the episode.

Links

• The paper on the invisible workload of open research
• Our live and in-person episode with Sandra...