Raphael Merz

pdf view of a paper on the journal website: first page is an ad ("Publishing research supporting global sustainability and innovation"). Above is says "Advertisement Start"...

Oh that's new!? First page of the pdf view of a paper on the journal's website is an ad to publish in the journal??

What comes next? 50% off your APC if you agree to have ads in the paper? Sure hope my university got a discount for this Netflix-style service+ads subscription...

Introducing Causion: A web app for playing with DAGs | Peder M. Isager Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

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Huge thanks to everyone who joined our growing community of young meta‑scientists 🧡

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This gif took way to long to create - I hope you like it!

When psychologists mislead us From Piltdown Man to the Stanford prison experiment, many famous scientific discoveries have been exposed as hoaxes or distortions

"The rewards to 'discovering' a spectacular scientific finding [in psychology] are large; the rewards to debunking frauds or deflating exaggerated claims are small if not non-existent. If these are the rules of the game, we should not be surprised at the way the game is played."

Picture of a snowman with snow-hat, stick hands and pine cone nose

Very excited to share results of the first finished project this year (shared first-authorship)! ☃️

In meinem Neurowissenschaften-Master haben wir sehr viele halb-gare „weil Hirn“-Erklärungen bekommen. Rückfragen haben mir nicht so oft geholfen aber bestimmt lag das an mir (weil zu wenig Hirn) :/

Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.

The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.

Perfect time to join the PYMS Discord if you haven’t already! We have a Meme Channel now!

Now this is a new one: My university's license of SAGE journals allows me to view but not to download the research articles. According to ChatGPT read-access costs 100K€ p.a. If you want to make 100% sure that interested readers can access your article, publish it in a #diamondopenaccess journal.

Getting journal rejections like

Looking for ways to contribute to open and reproducible research? Want to collaborate on projects (or start your own), develop skills, and connect with fellow enthusiasts from different countries and disciplines?
Then join our Steering Committee and become part of a global community!🚀

Which variables to control for, and why | Peder M. Isager Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager

New blog post! ”Which variables to control for, and why”: pedermisager.org/blog/which-v...
In this post I give a beginner-friendly introduction to causal inference and statistical control, explaining why adjusting for the right variables clarifies relationships >

Thanks! Yeah, I guess it’s a bit unclear. To me it seemed like they were talking about settings with many (arbitrary) decisions (where metaverse makes sense), so not sure what they‘re general stance on preregistration is. Maybe @dsquintana.bsky.social can help us?

I think this is missing some context: they are talking about multiverse settings where „[preregistration] risks favoring a single arbitrary perspective over a more comprehensive examination of the data.“ - literally the end of your quote.

Very useful table of insufficient examples vs. best-practices for statistical reporting!

Will definitely point some of my colleagues to it! 📈

Very cool! Have you thought about possible effects of word limits when writing articles? Your best-practices in Table 1 are usually (way) longer that the insufficient examples. But maybe reporting everything following best-practices literally doesn’t fit. How should we deal with this iyo?

Join the next PMGS workshop where @ambra-prg.bsky.social will explain how to use Quarto for your reproducible research! 🔓🧑‍🔬

I heard she‘s not even a real doctor?! 🤯

PCI Webinar Series - Peer Community In The PCI webinar series is a series of seminars on research practices, publication practices, evaluation, scientific integrity, meta-research, organised by Peer Community In

📣 Save the date for the 13th PCI webinar on December 1st, 2025, at 4 PM CET!! Simine Vazire (University of Melbourne, Australia) will present "Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis: Lessons from Psychology". For more details and registration, visit: buff.ly/wZNoD2v

@isager.bsky.social You were looking for causal inference examples to try with your students, no? 🚿

Highly recommend this opportunity! I was on the steering committee about 5-6 years ago and it was incredibly rewarding!

(P.S. where did the years go?? 😵‍💫)

I‘m starting a new 'migration log' here:

I work in the Netherlands, of course I commute by bike 🚴🏻

Check Scientific Papers for Best Practices A modular, extendable system for automatically checking scientific papers for best practices using text search, R code, and/or (optional) LLM queries.

Please help us, #MetaScience community!

It's time to decide on a forever name for papercheck (scienceverse.github.io/papercheck/). We don't want it to be confused with papercheck.ai, and we plan to check other research artifacts like repo contents, data, code, and prereg. Any suggestions?

Hallo zusammen, mein Name ist Raphael und ich habe kürzlich meinen Master in Psychologie abgeschlossen und im Oktober den PhD im Bereich MetaScience in den Niederlanden angefangen. Bevor ich euch mehr über meinen PhD erzähle, wollte ich aber ein bisschen was zu MetaScience allgemein erzählen:

This week, I'm posting on the German @realscientists.de account! Consider following if you're interested (and speak German)! :)

Better late than never: I graduated last month and started my PhD last week! 🥳

I’ll spend the next four years exploring how to make theory-based predictions of plausible effect sizes! 📚📈

Goodbye, Bochum – I will miss you! And hello, Eindhoven! 🚀

Today is the last day to sign up for the upcoming workshops (on the 16th) and the symposium (on the 17th) of Paul Meehl Graduate School. Don't miss it.

Join us for our next PYMS Journal Club! 📖🚀

Time is running out to register for our pre-symposium workshop and Meta Research Symposium event at Paul Meehl Graduate School
Check the information and registration links below:

paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/