Alex Holcombe

"Improving Acknowledgments Sections To Better Credit Research Contributors" v2 is now available on MetaArXiv osf.io/preprints/me... Took 2.5 weeks to approve the a new version, which will get longer as more and more people use AI to do metascientific analyses and overwhelm the moderators...

ECR Asks: Professor Alex Holcombe SORTEE blog

I was interviewed by Oakleigh Wilson of @sortee.bsky.social about why our scholarly publishing system is the way it is and how to fix it. Thanks to Oak for doing a LOT of "editing for clarity"! 🤣 sortee.org/blog/2026/03...

This is a really great discussion, and everyone (not just ECRs) should read it.

When was the last time you heard about WordPerfect? Perhaps on an academic journal submission site that hasn't been updated in years. Our governments spend billions on funding research and next to nothing on the infrastructure for publishing the manuscripts that report it.

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@westernsydneyu.bsky.social

tenzing.club has now supported producing Acknowledgment sections as well as author lists for several months now. Thanks thanks to @martonkovacs.bsky.social and @frederikaust.com, it now has 2 fewer bugs! Actually, we aren't aware of any remaining bugs..

That would help a lot but I'm against it because it would make academia even more beholden to Elsevier etc., which has long had a corrupting influence on academia, not just a funds-draining influence.

Other than falling back on old boys network, prestigious institutional marker type stuff, plus AI doing peer review, I dont know what will replace the current system. Even getting your preprint on a preprint server will be time-consuming and unreliable, depending on who you are, I think.

Because of the increase in submissions due to AI, the peer review system will collapse. The AI flood is happening at different rates for different fields and subtitles, so you might be spared so far.

www.reddit.com/r/Programmer...

Still, one can’t trust academics to not allow their scholarly societies to bloat and become v. expensive (non-profits in academia have become very rent-seeking in some areas), so we do need some discipline enforced by the funders, even in a landscape where publishers are mere service providers.

academia became beholden to the for-profit publishers rather than using them as service providers. If academics had ensured it was easy to switch publishers, and demanded that contracts serve academic values (such as low cost), the costs needn’t have spiraled out of control.

The situation is more akin to corporate capture. In the case of scientific journals, no one stopped for-profit publishers like Maxwell from taking over ownership. Combined with journals being more like monopolies than commodities (there were only one or a few respected journals in each field),

The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do OR: the long overdue forest fire

The problem cannot be reduced to the for-profit nature of scholarly publishers. In domains where there is real competition, like groceries, cars, or TVs, the free market delivers products that constantly get better, and cheaper. www.experimental-history.com/p/the-one-sc...

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Apparently he published two critiques in 90s that were largely ignored, and didn't publish again until 2019 - maybe it's the 2019 one that you liked? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

"Compared to what?" is one theme I have; it's my phrase for highlighting that one always needs to think about the control/comparison condition and the possibilty of confounds.

Here is my earlier post requesting suggestions, with responses bsky.app/profile/alex...

Nietfeld, E. (2025.). What the most famous book about trauma gets wrong. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk-psychology-therapy-ptsd/ Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score Learning styles . https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth Damian, R. I., & Roberts, B. W. (2015). Settling the debate on birth order and personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), 14119–14120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1519064112 What does popular media say about birth order? Compared to what? Crede, M. (2019). A Negative Effect of a Contractive Pose is not Evidence for the Positive Effect of an Expansive Pose: Comment on Cuddy, Schultz, and Fosse (2018). Meta-Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.15626/MP.2019.1723 Ferguson, C. J. (2025). Do social media experiments prove a link with mental health: A methodological and meta-analytic review. Psychology of Popular Media, 14(2), 201. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-80192-001 Bunce, C., Eggleston, A., Brennan, R., & Over, H. (2025). To what extent is research on infrahumanization confounded by intergroup preference? Royal Society Open Science, 12(4). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/12/4/241348/235666

Looking for more suggestions for take-downs of popular psychology claims, based on critiquing the underlying flawed research. This is for an undergraduate seminar. Here are the suitable ones I have so far.

hahahaha. Oh god.

e.g. "preference for the stimulus with the higher reward probability is “the signature of true statistical inference”" does seem like shocking ignorance rather than duplicity or hyperbole.

@markhaselgrove.bsky.social I've only read your abstract but this whole thing sounds like a simple case of animal cognition researchers not knowing the very first thing about associative learning. Is that what you think is usually going on in such cases?

"40% of papers about subarachnoid haemorrhage in animals contained manipulated images."

We have to face up to the fact that in some fields, over half of published science might be fake.

The courtyard of the Jameh Friday mosque in Esfahan

Illicit singing and dancing (banned) under the bridge in Esfahan. Esfahan was known as a place where the mullahs had less control over such things.

Under the bridge in Esfahan

The famous square in Esfahan again (not sure about the second photo).

There are so many beautiful mosques that some look neglected, with no tourists. This is the Nasir-ol-molk mosque in Shiraz.

Buying spices in the Shiraz bazaar

The 18th-century Karim Kahn citadel in Shiraz

Here are schoolchildren, I think in Esfahan. Looks like one of the famous bridges?

In 2004, I visited Esfahan and Shiraz, two beautiful cities that the NYT is showing have now been hit by the US (hoping military targets). The plaza in Esfahan is one of the beautiful in the world. Here is the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque seen from Ali Qapu palace.