Drink driver given suspended sentence over grandmother's hit-run death A drunk driver who struck and killed 83-year-old Mary Kathleen Kelly on the Gold Coast is given a suspended jail term, as the victim's family continue to mourn the loss of her "contagious, exuberant e...

Same happening in Australia, a drunk driver kills a women and gets off scott free www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

On slowing down A blog about statistics, meta-research, metascience and academia

Some notes on slow science medianwatch.netlify.app/post/slow_sc...

Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.

Markus Englund built a tool for identifying repetitive sequences in scientific datasets! Read up here: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

I've been trying to find highly cited statisticians using Google Scholar, but it's full of names that I don't recognise. Whenever I click on them, I see they have 5+ global burden of disease papers with thousands of citations ... and thousands of authors. Some kind of author weighting is needed.

I am currently loving Restoration by Rose Tremain

A few histograms and scatter plots were enough to show the faults. That and the fact that the people who posted them said don’t use them for research!

Evidence of Unreliable Data and Poor Data Provenance in Clinical Prediction Model Research and Clinical Practice Clinical prediction models are often created using large routinely collected datasets. It is essential that prediction models are developed with appropriate data and methods and transparently reported...

Much of my work in meta-research is on finding problems in research, so I've seen a lot of bad practices. However, even I was shocked by hundreds of researchers publishing papers using data that is faked and has no data provenance. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6.... Amazing work by my student Alex.

Essential skills for statistics leadership in consultancy and research, 9-10 July 2026

🌟 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐎𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 & 𝐌𝐢𝐝-𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 #𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬!
Thanks to support from the Theo Murphy Initiative Australia, we’re excited to launch a 2-day symposium - 𝐄𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 #𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡

➡️ 𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐎𝐈 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐝: bit.ly/eoistatleadership2026

Use as directed? A comparison of software tools intended to check rigor and transparency of published work The causes of the reproducibility crisis include lack of standardization and transparency in scientific reporting. Checklists such as ARRIVE and CONSORT seek to improve transparency, but they are not always followed by authors and peer review often fails to identify missing items. To address these issues, there are several automated tools that have been designed to check different rigor criteria. We have conducted a broad comparison of 11 automated tools across 9 different rigor criteria from the ScreenIT group. We found some criteria, including detecting open data, where the combination of tools showed a clear winner, a tool which performed much better than other tools. In other cases, including detection of inclusion and exclusion criteria, the combination of tools exceeded the performance of any one tool. We also identified key areas where tool developers should focus their effort to make their tool maximally useful. We conclude with a set of insights and recommendations for stakeholders in the development of rigor and transparency detection tools. The code and data for the study is available at https://github.com/PeterEckmann1/tool-comparison.

Eckmann et al* compare software tools for checking rigor and transparency in published work.

*incl. @aidybarnett.bsky.social @gcabanac.cpesr.fr @kaitlynhair.bsky.social @skmccann.bsky.social @martijnroelandse.dev @colbyvorland.bsky.social @tweissgerber.bsky.social

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Anyone know what's going on with OpenAlex? Seems like it's open no longer, or at least only ajar as it's severely limited queries to the API. I've got two ongoing projects that have been completely blindsided by this.

Oversight of Research Outputs by Public Organisations as a Threat to Research Integrity: A Personal Account from Australia - Journal of Academic Ethics Research governance processes in Australian public organisations raise significant concerns for research integrity, particularly regarding the pre-dissemination review and editing of research outputs....

Join ReproducibiliTea Melbourne journal club this Thursday 4pm AEDT, to discuss "Oversight of Research Outputs by Public Organisations as a Threat to Research Integrity” by C. Brandenburg & @aidybarnett.bsky.social

Zoom: uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83909186903
#ResearchIntegrity @reproducibilitea.org

Any chance it's recorded? It's a 3am my time.

1/2 Nail in the coffin of dichotomania: @erik-van-zwet.bsky.social 's paper with @stephensenn.bsky.social and myself just published: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... with extended discussion at discourse.datamethods.org/t/dichotomiz... #Statistics #StatsSky #rct #clinicaltrial

Can you justify using (and paying for) a service that generates a ready to submit paper with just one prompt?
🧵

Closing the paper mines Scientific fakery is a centuries old problem. Twinned with the long history of hard-working scientists earning fame for genuine discoveries, runs a tawdry history of those who were willing fabricat...

📝 Latest Article Commentary Alert! 📝

"Closing the paper mines"

@aidybarnett.bsky.social & @jabyrnesci.bsky.social

→ doi.org/10.1080/0898...

#PaperMill
#ResearchMisconduct
#AI
#GenAI
#ResearchIntegrity

Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning? After a newborn died of opioid poisoning, a new branch of pediatrics came into being. But the evidence doesn’t add up.

An outstanding long-read on research integrity and outright lies. It made me gasp out loud. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520...

Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

New tool exposes scale of fake research flooding cancer science A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”.

“If fabricated studies make their way into the evidence base, they can mislead real scientists and ultimately slow progress for patients."

Published in The BMJ, a new AI tool developed by @aidybarnett.bsky.social and colleagues has exposed the scale of fake studies flooding cancer research.

Everybody loses when research results are changed or supressed. This is an ongoing problem in Australia. As a start, we need a conversation between researchers and bureaucrats/lawyers.

Fellowship schemes by Australian funding agencies invite researchers to disclose personal career disruptions to promote equity. But this well-meaning policy can expose private medical details to non-medically trained reviewers and create new risks of bias

Read more: buff.ly/BriGjyG

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

Less is more. This aphorism is constantly on my mind. The scientific publication system is under tremendous strain, the last thing it needs is a massive dump of LLM generated/aided papers. If you love science, then show it some love. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is a statistical blunder that I've never seen before. Excluding zeros and ones because they didn't give a usable number after log-transforming. No idea why they simply didn't add a constant before transforming, or better still use a Poisson model.

On the world's largest hospital ship volunteers give people a chance at a better life On the largest civilian hospital ship in the world, Australian volunteers provide life-changing healthcare that is transforming lives.

A wonderful article from the ABC on Mercy Ships www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

Number of days since I've seen an emu: 0.

Client Challenge

A case study on how an Australian government agency changed the results of a qualitative study. Editing or suppressing research findings is not good policy, can lead to harms, and is awful to experience as a researcher.
Journal: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
OA: eprints.qut.edu.au/262261/

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left “We can no longer lend our credibility to an organization that has lost its integrity,” write four scientists and administrators who recently resigned from the NIH.

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n... via @statnews.com

The complete collapse of the NIH, CDC, and FDA is so tragic and damaging to not only the U.S., but the world...

Dark Age 2.0.

Book cover: Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala

I read this excellent book last year about the US coup in Guatemala. So much death and destruction built on lies.

Put pressure on publishers to follow best practice — external regulation is the answer Journals that work hard to meet the needs of both authors and readers should be acknowledged publicly — encouraging others to follow suit.

"It might be easy to dismiss the idea of ISO 9001 as just another tool to encourage best practice among publishers. But journal certification would fill a long-standing gap in the chain of external oversight from conduct to translation of research."

@jabyrnesci.bsky.social writes in @nature.com !

Black white and red butterfly resting on a tree.

Swallowtail butterfly in my garden.

Coercive citations Reviewer citation requests can turn peer review into a transaction rather than an objective critique of the article.

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited?