Blogs

A conversation - Where do ecology and evolution stand in the broader ‘reproducibility crisis’ of science?

By Tim Parker in blog

January 31, 2018

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] In this post, I float some ideas that I’ve had about the ‘reproducibility crisis’ as it is emerging in ecology and evolutionary biology, and how this emergence may or may not differ from what is happening in other disciplines, in particular psychology. Two other experts on this topic (Fiona Fidler and David Mellor) respond to my ideas, and propose some different ideas as well.

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Reproducibility Project - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

By Hannah Fraser in blog

December 22, 2017

[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

By Shinichi Nakagawa in blog

December 12, 2017

[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

By Tim Parker in blog

November 14, 2017

[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?

By Tim Parker in blog

October 30, 2017

[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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Ecologists and evolutionary biologists can and should pre-register their research

By Tim Parker in blog

October 26, 2017

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] I wrote a draft of this post a few weeks ago, and now seems like a good time for it to see the light of day given the great new pre-print just posted on OSF Preprints by Brian Nosek, David Mellor, and co-authors. They describe the utility of pre-registration across a variety of circumstances. I do something similar here, though I focus on ecology and evolutionary biology and I don’t try to be as thorough as Nosek et al.

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