Unfork Statistics

New submission format at SBE:
“Replications as Registered Reports”

link.springer.com/journal/1118...

You can get "in-principle acceptance" before data collection even begins; final paper gets published regardless the results, if the study is conducted rigorously.

#EconSky

Screenshot of article title and lede: Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It) In 2003, a marketing consultant named Fred Reichheld lit the business world on fire with the Harvard Business Review article The One Number You Need To Grow. He asserted that by asking a single question—a question aimed at determining the organization’s customer’s loyalty—management could take the pulse of their customers’ feelings towards their business. He ended the article with “This number is the one number you need to grow. It’s that simple and that profound.” It turns out, it’s neither simple nor profound. It doesn’t help businesses grow. It doesn’t even tell the management how loyal the customer is.

Sadly the NPS is fundamentally flawed regardless of how nonsensical, or otherwise, it is to ask if customers are moved to do voluntary work for the marketing team. This is a decent summary of the many, many problems with it:

archive.ph/I3uce

More perils ... bsky.app/profile/did:...

On the perils of open data.

Archive link: archive.ph/ZavpU

Emory libraries cancel Elsevier journals due to rising journal costs The Emory Wheel is the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University, since 1919.

Emory libraries cancel Elsevier journals due to rising journal costs 📚
www.emorywheel.com/article/2026...

Machine learning research is not serious research and therefore hallucinated references are not necessarily a big deal, agrees a prestigious group of machine learning researchers
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/26/m...

We are always excited to see the QUOD Biobank grow, with samples from over 9,000 donors.

We are grateful, as always, for the generosity of our donor families and to the teams across the UK who make collection possible, helping us to support research into improving transplantation outcomes.

Image showing a poster presented by SRI team at the NHSBT Clinical and R&D conference in January 2026

Image showing a poster presented by SRI team at the NHSBT Clinical and R&D conference in January 2026

Image showing a poster presented by SRI team at the NHSBT Clinical and R&D conference in January 2026

Image showing a poster presented by SRI team at the NHSBT Clinical and R&D conference in January 2026

We are so proud to present 9 posters at the NHSBT Clinical and R&D Conference this year!

@liseestcourt.bsky.social @transfusionlib.bsky.social @stemcellevidence.bsky.social @btjo.bsky.social @thrinaline.bsky.social

Position statement on artificial intelligence (AI) use in evidence synthesis across Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2025 | Cochrane Library

www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10....

Some guest editors pack special issues with their own articles Thousands have penned more than one-third of a journal issue, raising conflict-of-interest concerns

#SpecialIssues have fueled the growth of some of the largest #OpenAccess publishers. Does a journal that allows a #GuestEditor to both plan a special issue and write many articles in it have a conflict of interest? #scicomm #peerreview @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

Here's a suggestion for a New Year's resolution: If you see influential bad research, say something. One part of the whole replication crisis story is that a lot of psychological researchers privately knew that a lot of stuff was bad, but it wasn't discussed publicly.

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

Point of no return: academic #funding is at a tipping point. When the effort and money spent applying for grants equals or exceeds the funding awarded, the system stops serving science and starts draining it. Time to rethink how we fund #research.
🧪🌐🌍
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Good thread. My concern is, CI is presented as a solution to bad stats when in reality it suffers from many of the same limitations. We can almost never be certain of most reqs in any case -- exogeneity; data integrity; missingness mechanisms; selection bias to name a few (1/2)
#statsky #econsky

WTF is this? I did not write or submit this paper. Are journals now run entirely by AIs who hallucinate entire publications?

Knowledge Of Pregnant Women About The Benefits Of Pregnancy Books In Ottawa | International Journal of Health Engineering and Technology share.google/ArcgxhUDfSY9...

These claims about what AI can do truly need citations. Checking statistics isn’t routine work, nor is whether citations to the literature are sensible.

Whether statistics are appropriate and render reasonable inferences is inherently a question of human judgement.

Finally, if you can get through the paywall this piece from earlier in the week illuminates how the experience above is just a tiny part of an industrial-scale, global, and sector-wide catastrophe of AI and citations to nonexistent papers in academic publishing bsky.app/profile/mile...

Does e-cigarette use cause stroke? ~2 years ago, Gal Cohen & I alerted MDPI to fatal flaws in a published paper which claimed nicotine vaping causes stroke. This morning, the journal finally retracted the flawed article: doi.org/10.3390/neur... ... #tobaccocontrol #harmreduction #statistics

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

I made an error that I found thanks to @lukaswallrich.bsky.social. The code and preprint have been corrected/updated. Effects on false positive rates are smaller and only for alternative and correlation method but I think the overall argument still works.

They're eliminating the Statistic Department as the Admins apparently can't do basic math or data scrubbing. "Other errors they found included numerous data errors, such as misplaced decimal points and incorrectly typed data." #stats

🎯

statsepi.substack.com/p/the-review...

A Threat to Evidence-Based Vaccine Policy and Public Health Security at the FDA | NEJM Twelve former commissioners of the FDA express concern that the agency’s recent moves will undermine a regulatory model designed to ensure vaccine safety, effectiveness, and availability.

A Threat to Evidence-Based Vaccine Policy and Public Health Security at the FDA: former FDA commissioners call out Dr. Prasad's departure from previous standards in @nejm.org www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

“In this case we are up against the seductive allure of claims we’d like to believe are true but aren’t – that tobacco is really not that harmful, at least not by itself, or that we can prevent and cure cancer with some kind of ‘mind work,’ and so on,” Buchanan told us. “This dubious research needs to be flagged with sufficient prominence and transparency wherever it appears to prevent researchers taking it in good faith.” A 1991 book by Eysenck, for instance, claimed psychosocial factors like stress and personality type were six times as predictive of cancer and heart disease as smoking, cholesterol levels or blood pressure. Pelosi told us the book summarized Eysenck’s work with Grossarth-Maticek and a draft had been sent to tobacco giant Philip Morris International, which helped fund the two researchers’ work.

Of course they were funding it.

Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’ Hans Eysenck A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a profe…

Diederik Stapel was a massive watershed moment in psychology.

However, he was -- and let's be slightly glib here -- some guy from The Netherlands who wrote social psychology papers.

The full accounting of the Eysenck case is approx, at minimum, TWO STAPELS.

retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/n...

“A great deal of effort has been invested to evaluate if factors like questionable research practices (etc.) affect replicability and effect heterogeneity. We would like to see more of that effort going into critical examinations of the interac-tion between common measures and methods.”

[Pic] is such an important point. If you're never wrong, you can't learn anything. And if you're afraid to be wrong, you're easy prey for plausible-sounding misinformation. Education, no matter the subject, is about how to think. The facts/ideas/materials change, the skills required do not.

15-year-old bug 😐 in an industry that has the highest profit margins possible pretty much

www.theguardian.com/science/2017...

Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2 “Immunity debt,” a theory to explain the global surge in non-covid infections since pandemic restrictions were lifted, is increasingly being challenged by emerging evidence. Nick Tsergas reports Myco...

The most important part of this article, to me, is the end.

It challenges a false binary between “long COVID” and “everyone else.”

Maybe it's a spectrum... 🧵 (1/5)

www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Domain knowledge is always critical for the appropriate application of statistical methods. Here, it would have prevented this embarrassing episode occurring at all.

Not sure where this is from, but assuming it’s right, there are clear implications for countering the replication crisis and “false positive” psychology: Insufficient sample sizes are a primary culprit, and should be a primary target of reforms.