Lisa DeBruine

As an academic community, why can't we have just one format for references? If you never hear from me again, it's because trying to reconcile journal reference sections, bibtex, doi.org, crossref and openalex formats has murdered me.

A thesis student is looking at parasocial attachment to generative AI in undergraduate and postgraduate students. The questionnaire will take about 10 minutes. Please pass the study link on to anyone who might be interested.

exp.psy.gla.ac.uk/project?para...

a stuffed white cat is sitting on top of a box and asking why ? ALT: a stuffed white cat is sitting on top of a box and asking why ?

WtF?

This is a new phenomenon and business model exploiting gaps in publishing. The cartel uses fake names to produce AI-written or plagiarised papers. Reference lists contain 100s of paid entries.If papers are retracted, no real authors are punished, and citations still count, even from retracted papers

These sorts of stories are why I’m afraid to bring my son to visit his grandparents, now that he’s over 18 and not a US citizen.

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...

If you have about 20 minutes, I would be grateful if you could help my undergraduate student explore whether common empathy questionnaires are actually interchangable in the ways they are used in the social science literature.

The presentation of the Cass report as this gospel text is also disingenuous given the significant academic criticism it has received.

Just last year, a peer-reviewed critique led by Irish researchers from the University of Galway found serious flaws with the report.

Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization How do you write text that conveys the whole meaning of a visualization? You probably can’t. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try

Many struggle with writing alt text for charts and other other data visualizations. Amy Cesal's "Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization" hammers home the importance of explaining the chart type, the type of data, and the reason for the chart.

medium.com/nightingale/...

Pick up the nearest (e)book. Turn to page 42, post the second sentence.

There is also an ‘I’ in ‘silver,’” he said.

(If you know what that’s from, I expect you have the same brain worm I do lately🏒)

FYI: pat of the problem is the model I was using.

groq/openai/gpt-oss-120b is very fussy, and won’t let you have an array at the top level.

openai/gpt-4.1 is less fussy and works with a broader range of ways to set up the json structure.

I can, of course, manually iterate, convert each returned list into a table, add the index, and then combine to one table. But I feel like I must be missing something about ellmer functions.

Any recs for better learning material than the docs/website?

My problem is each string I need to evaluate may have 0 or more power analyses (object B above), but the parallel functions in ellmer just return a list with each extracted power analysis and no indication of which string it is from (most have 1, but some have 0 and some have 2).

I am swinging wildly between loving and hating ellmer. It makes some things much easier, but other things much harder than my original technique of describing the JSON I want and parsing the returned JSON text into a table.

Is anyone here an expert on #rstats ellmer structured data?

It works when I define the JSON schema of an object A containing an array of object B, but not when I read object B from JSON schema and use type_object and type_array to set up object A.

Reprex: gist.github.com/debruine/d35...

Ok that is like 5 steps and several minutes for water boiling and butter softening! The vegetable peeler method takes 10 seconds.

I do not own a microwave and am 99.5% of the time pretty happy with that (my kitchen is tiny)

It’s usually about 15C when I wake up lately (my landlord won’t let me install a smart thermostat) so the butter is very hard, but I’ve discovered (maybe you all already knew this) that using a vegetable peeler to get thin slices makes cold butter so easy to spread! #lifehacks 🧈

(Just saw you already have an eSIM)

I struggled with this for a year, and had to constantly restart my phone to get data. The only thing that worked was switching to an eSIM, and no idea why that helped.

a cartoon of donald duck says " and a bah humbug " to you ALT: a cartoon of donald duck says " and a bah humbug " to you

Our publishing system does not prioritise or value the careful curation of research data to be FAIR nearly enough. I have been data editing for AP&P for a year now, and it is sad to see no reward for the clearly careful organisation of data and materials vs that which is thrown on OSF with no care!

@posit.co this fundamentally undermines me using your products as a teaching tool. Will this be in posit cloud too? If so, instructors need to be able to switch this off in module workspaces.

Same. I meant to catch up on open research news, but there’s no way to avoid the rest of it.

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

I absolutely love myself a unique identifier, but why oh why, DOI, do you allow formats like this?!

10.1002/(SICI)1099-1611(200001/02)9:1<11::AID-PON424>3.0.CO;2-Z

(Also why does the CrossRef API deal with parentheses so weird? You can't URL-encode them in queries)

Don’t worry, already on it!! I’m pretty close, and we can check references for a closest match on crossref and flag anything that might have a typo or a significant mismatch. And then, of course, a human has to look at the flagged papers and check if anything is actually wrong.

🥳 so well-deserved!

(Also yay for twin prof titles ;)

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.

Yes! The UK metascience funding is always so narrow in scope.

Metadata matters!
If you submit a preprint to PsyArXiv, to ensure smooth acceptance, don't forget to fill out the metadata correctly.

Below you will find a few tips, but detailed guidelines are at 👉 buff.ly/M3cRBW2