Trials

[Jo Bowyer]

Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...et_cid=1850952

[Jo Bowyer]

Psychological Placebo and Nocebo Effects on Pain Rely on Expectation and Previous Experience

http://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5...925-6/fulltext

Highlights

The authors introduced a purely psychological, non-pharmacological placebo-nocebo paradigm.


A combined manipulation of experience and expectation led to a significant modulation of pain.


Even abstract treatments might alter the perception of pain.


The authors' manipulation induced stronger nocebo than placebo responses.


The results demonstrate the need for further research on the prevention of nocebo effects.

[Jo Bowyer]

Seventeen volunteers let this worm live inside them to help defeat a dangerous disease

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...et_cid=1864988

Yeurch!!!!! and huge kudos to the volunteers.

[Jo Bowyer]

New tool looks for signs of image doctoring

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/...age-doctoring/

[Jo Bowyer]

What if we could scan for image duplication the way we check for plagiarism?

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/04/...or-plagiarism/

[Jo Bowyer]

Patient-important outcomes in systematic reviews: Poor quality of evidence

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0195460

[Jo Bowyer]

Retraction Watch: How often do scientists who commit misconduct do it again?

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/04/...t-do-it-again/

[Jo Bowyer]

Nature says it wants to publish replication attempts. So what happened when a group of authors submitted one to Nature Neuroscience?

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/05/...-neuroscience/

[Jo Bowyer]

Survey says: A researcher wasn’t sure if he needed to correct a paper. So he created a poll.

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/05/...reated-a-poll/

[Jo Bowyer]

Before reproducibility must come preproducibility

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05256-0

Our lack of a precise vocabulary — in particular the fact that we don’t have a word for ‘you didn’t tell me what you did in sufficient detail for me to check it’ — contributes to the crisis of scientific reproducibility. In computational science, ‘reproducible’ often means that enough information is provided to allow a dedicated reader to repeat the calculations in the paper for herself. In biomedical disciplines, ‘reproducible’ often means that a different lab, starting the experiment from scratch, would get roughly the same experimental result.

The distinction between a preproducible scientific report and current common practice is like the difference between a partial list of ingredients and a recipe. To bake a good loaf of bread, it isn’t enough to know that it contains flour. It isn’t even enough to know that it contains flour, water, salt and yeast. The brand of flour might be omitted from the recipe with advantage, as might the day of the week on which the loaf was baked. But the ratio of ingredients, the operations, their timing and the temperature of the oven cannot.

Given preproducibility — a ‘scientific recipe’ — we can attempt to make a similar loaf of scientific bread. If we follow the recipe but do not get the same result, either the result is sensitive to small details that cannot be controlled, the result is incorrect or the recipe was not precise enough (things were omitted to disadvantage).

Depending on the discipline, preproducibility might require information about materials (including organisms and their care), instruments and procedures; experimental design; raw data at the instrument level; algorithms used to process the raw data; computational tools used in analyses, including any parameter settings or ad hoc choices; code, processed data and software build environments; or analyses that were tried and abandoned.

[Jo Bowyer]

CAN AUDITING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HELP FIX ITS REPRODUCIBILITY CRISIS?

https://psmag.com/news/can-auditing-...ibility-crisis

[Jo Bowyer]

UK House of Commons committee wants to make sure “university investigations into research misconduct are handled appropriately”

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/...appropriately/

[Jo Bowyer]

Does meditation work?

https://aeon.co/essays/can-meditatio...a6448-69418129

[Jo Bowyer]

Redefining the ‘E’ in EBM

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/23/2/46

[Jo Bowyer]

Meet two data sleuths who paid a steep price for raising concerns about a problematic paper

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/...lematic-paper/