#metaresearch — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #metaresearch, aggregated by home.social.
-
A timely new commentary in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology raises an uncomfortable question:
Can anti-metric research assessment reforms backfire in weak academic systems?
:doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2026.112430
Reducing metrics may work where institutions are strong. But in fragile systems, it may unintentionally increase the influence of favouritism, academic inbreeding, and opaque decision-making.
#ResearchAssessment #CoARA #DORA #Bibliometrics #MetaResearch #OpenScience #SciencePolicy
-
My latest article has been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review. The paper examines how scientific misconduct, questionable research practices, research climate, and supervision are studied across disciplines & research systems.
:doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-026-00214-1
One key takeaway: research integrity risks are shaped not only by individual behaviour, but also by research environments, supervision, evaluation systems.
#ResearchIntegrity #AcademicIntegrity #MetaResearch #SciencePolicy
-
1/ If you're following the debacle on the Democratic National Committee autopsy on the 2024 election, here's my #metascience take on the problem.
Why Kamala Harris lost in 2024 is an empirical question. It's a complicated empirical question with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of relevant factors. It's made even more complicated by the presence of background preferences and wishful thinking.
If we're not careful, it's a tangled mix of descriptive empirical questions (why did some previous Dem voters shift to the right) and normative questions (what should we do next time to prevent that). Here I'll bracket the normative questions and focus on the empirical ones.
When scientists address complicated empirical questions, we don't expect one researcher or team to identify all the relevant factors in one publication. We don't even expect the entire field to identify all relevant factors in one generation. We expect incremental advances. We expect many researchers to identify many factors over time, tussle over the empirical evidence for and against them, give different factors different weights, differ on which factors are most salient, and differ in how to take the most salient factors into account. And we do all that in public.
#Democrats #DNC #Metaresearch #USPol #USPolitics
🧵
-
Owning mistakes is part of doing science.
More researchers are speaking openly about retractions, helping shift the culture from blame to transparency.
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00763-x
#ScienceCulture #Research #Integrity #OpenScience #MetaResearch #CtrlZAward
-
Idea for a different way of doing project grants. Make decisions about which projects to fund based only on the questions asked, and then require successful grantees to go through a multi round post decision review process to sharpen up the methods and make sure they can answer the question.
One of the main reasons I find grant proposals and reviews unsatisfactory is the incentives are there for applicants to hide methodological issues which limits the collaborative value of the review. In this version, once you get the funding you want to bare all to get the best feedback to improve.
-
Interested in reproducibility? Natural history? #MetaResearch? There's an eLife Collection for that!
Get reading today: https://elifesciences.org/collections?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic.
-
RE: https://mastodon.social/@MetaArXiv/116098607342372256
Yet another example of how so-called "#AI" entrenches existing problems in academic research.
#metaScience #metaresearch #academia #academicChatter #NoAI #maihT3k
-
Read myself and @RoRInstitute colleague Anna Butters on distributed peer review
We enjoyed writing this, and I think it gives a good, albeit very short, review of the context of funders having to make hard (impossible?) choices on what to fund
-
👀 Here's Stuart Buck with some GOOD news about the research system
"When all institutions look the same, their output tends to be the same as well. Tens of thousands of scientists (usually government-funded) labor within the same constraints, incentives, and pressures to conform.
If we want to see a higher rate of scientific breakthroughs, we should pursue institutional diversity for that reason alone."
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/innovations-in-scientific-institutions
-
Pre-announcement for UKRI's Metascience research grants, round 2
https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/metascience-research-grants-round-2/
"Apply for funding to undertake cutting-edge Metascience research into more effective ways of conducting and supporting research and development (R&D), including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), how to optimise research institutions and the challenges of measuring research excellence."
Opens Feb 12rd, deadline Apr 23rd
-
Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65660-9
New from @rmrahal and colleagues
Funder was German Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education (Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre). "Lottery-first" meant short EoI were submitted and randomisation used to select those allowed to apply
-
Big news. I’ve started a new position as Principal Investigator at the University of Coimbra 🇵🇹
I'm joining the meta-research group led by @T_Weissgerber and the EXCELScIOR ERA Chair project (https://excelscior.uc.pt/) funded by the @EUCommission
I'm thrilled to join this historic university & continue my work on #MetaResearch #EvidenceSynthesis & #OpenScience
The new office, at the Palácio dos Grilos, could not be more iconic 👇
-
ARMA Research Evaluation SIG Drop-In Session: Randomisation in funding allocation
Online, 6th of October.
- I will speak on the work we do at @RoRInstitute on experiments and evaluation of Partial Randomisation
-
Reliability, bias and randomisation in peer review: a simulation
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4gqce_v1
New preprint from UK Metascience Unit argues that randomisation of proposal selection will necessarily reduce sensitivity to proposal quality
-
Distributed Peer Review : Democratising funding evaluation
New work from myself, the team at @RoRInstitute and the Volkswagen Foundation, evaluating their trial of DPR, showing
- it can cut time to deliver funding
- researchers like it (mostly)
- many (~10) reviews per proposal allows insight into the irreducible uncertainty of grant review"How to" guide: https://rori.figshare.com/articles/report/RoRI_Insights_Applicants_as_reviewers_-_a_Guide_to_Distributed_Peer_Review/29270534?file=55233935
-
We are proud to announce a new agreement with
@rorinstitute and
@aimos_inc to become a partner journal with MetaResearch Open Review (MetaRoR)
@MetaRORLearn more: plos.io/45wPZB9
-
JOB : Join RoRI as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Metascience
https://researchonresearch.org/join-rori-as-a-research-fellow-senior-research-fellow-in-metascience/
Closing 9th of July, based in London/hybrid. Full time, fixed term until 31/12/2027
(apologies for late notice, full disclosure: I am a @RoRInstitute research fellow)
--> please boost for reach <--
-
Interesting idea - Pop Up Journals which run for 5-6 years on a focused research problem and then plan to close. The journal analogue of a FRO
Introduced by Daniel Goroff at #ICSSI2025. The Sloan Foundation is sponsoring a pop up journal on Griliches Question - calculating good values for the ROI for R&D
-
Open scholarly metadata is actually such a huge mess, especially for monographs, edited volumes, grey lit, i.e. anything that isn't an english STEM journal article.
Which actually explains so much about why the "metascience" scene is how it is....
-
Differences in psychologists’ cognitive traits are associated with scientific divides
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02153-1
New in NHB
-
🔬✨ Interested in improving research transparency & reproducibility? Join the Meta-Science Summer School to design & launch a meta-research study!
➡️ Co-organized by the @GermanRepro
👥 Participants will learn about meta-research by designing and collecting data for a meta-research study in a small team
📅 Date: 15 - 20 June 2025; Apply by March 21, 2025!
🔗 More info: https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/meta-science-summer-school-designing-and-conducting-studies-to-improve-research
🌐 Language: English
📌 Location: Frankfurt, Germany
#OpenScience #Reproducibility #MetaResearch #GRN (lmf) -
List of grant winners from first UKRI Metascience call
(published 13 feb, but I missed it)
Congratulations all
