A Tale of Two Anachronisms
How to produce credible research, on anything
Zoltan Kekecs is an assistant professor at ELTE. Earlier he worked as a post-doctor at Baylor University, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience; at Imperial College London, Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, and at Lund University, Institute of Psychology. His research focuses on the efficacy and underlying psychophysiological mechanisms of medical hypnosis. He also leads the ELTE and Lund Research Credibility Workgroups, aiming to develop tools and methodologies that can enhance the credibility of research in psychological science. His professional accomplishments have been recognized by the Early Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. He is also active in professional societies: Since 2018 he is a methodologist and member of the Data and Methods Committee of the Psychological Science Accelerator, and he is an elected officer of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Earlier he was the treasurer of the American Psychological Association Division 30.
Collaboration patterns in science
Marta Sales-Pardo graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998 and obtained a Ph.D. in Physics from Universitat de Barcelona in 2002. She then moved to Northwestern University, where she first worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008, she became a Research Assistant Professor at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2009, she accepted her current position as in the Departament d’Enginyeria Química at Universitat Rovira i Virgili. In 2013 she received an ICREA Acadèmia Award for excellence in research.
Tim Errington is the Director of Research at the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA that has a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. In this role, Tim collaborates with researchers and stakeholders across scientific disciplines and organizations on projects aimed to understand the current research process and to evaluate initiatives designed to increase reproducibility and openness of scientific research. Tim earned a B.S. degree in both Biology and Chemistry from St. Lawrence University, an M.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology from the University of Virginia.
Annette Brown is the Principal Economist at FHI 360, an international non-profit working to improve the health and well-being of people around the world through research and program implementation. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief, and frequently writes for, FHI 360’s R&E Search for Evidence blog. Annette’s career in international development has spanned academe, non-profits, and for-profits. For the last decade she has focused on supporting and promoting the use of high-quality evidence for programs and policy. Her current research interests include the role and practice of replication research and the systematic review of evidence across a variety of topics. She has published in numerous social science and public health journals, and recently co-guest-edited a special journal section on replication of development impact evaluations. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan as a National Science Foundation Fellow and a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Grinnell College.
Checking Robustness in 4 Steps
Michèle B. Nuijten is an Assistant Professor at the Meta-Research Center at Tilburg University, where she studies reproducibility and replicability in psychology. She received her PhD in Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University in 2018. Her PhD thesis, titled “Research on Research: A Meta-Scientific Study of Problems and Solutions in Psychological Science”, was awarded the Tilburg University Dissertation Prize. As part of her research, Michèle co-developed the free tool statcheck; a “spellchecker” for statistics. Statcheck has gained popularity as a pre-publication check: since its launch in 2016, the web app was visited tens of thousands times, and the journals Psychological Science and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology have made statcheck a standard element in their peer-review process. Besides her research, Michèle is closely involved with the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), having been a member of the executive committee, and past-chair of the program committee. She is also part of the Program Committee Replication Research of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, advising them on distributing funding for replication research.
Carl T. Bergstrom is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Dr. Bergstrom’s research uses mathematical, computational, and statistical models to understand how information flows through biological and social systems. His recent projects include contributions to the game theory of communication and deception, use of information theory to the study of evolution by natural selection, game-theoretic models and empirical work on the sociology of science, and development of mathematical techniques for mapping and comprehending large network datasets. In the applied domain, Dr. Bergstrom’s work illustrates the value of evolutionary biology for solving practical problems in medicine and beyond. These problems include dealing with drug resistance, handling the economic externalities associated with anthropogenic evolution, and controlling novel emerging pathogens such as the SARS virus, Ebola virus, and H5N1 avian influenza virus. He is the coauthor of the college textbook Evolution, published by W. W. Norton and Co., and teaches undergraduate courses on evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and the importance of evolutionary biology to the fields of medicine and public health. Dr. Bergstrom received his Ph.D. in theoretical population genetics from Stanford University in 1998; after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University, where he studied the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 2001.
Simine Vazire is a faculty member in the psychology department at UC Davis. She studies meta-science and research methods/practices, as well as personality psychology and self-knowledge. Vazire received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2000 and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. She has been an editor at several journals, including Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science from 2015 to 2019 and founding co-senior editor of the open access journal Collabra: Psychology. Together with Brian Nosek, Vazire founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS). She served as the first president of SIPS and continues to serve on the executive committee. She also serves on the board of PLOS and BITSS and was a member of the executive committee of the Association for Psychological Science. She was awarded the Leamer-Rosenthal prize for open social science from BITSS, and the APA’s distinguished scientific award for early career contribution to psychology.
Towards a more self-correcting science
Dorothy Bishop is a psychologist who holds a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, where she heads an ERC-funded programme of research into cerebral lateralisation for language. She is a supernumerary fellow of St John’s College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Her main research interests are in the nature and causes of developmental language difficulties, with a particular focus on psycholinguistics, neurobiology and genetics. In 2015 Dorothy chaired a symposium on Reproducibility in Biomedical Science organised by the Academy of Medical Sciences, Wellcome Trust, MRC, and BBSRC, and she is chairing the advisory board of the recently-formed UK Reproducibility Network. She has a popular blog, Bishopblog, which features posts on a wide range of topics, including those relevant to reproducibility.