Dr Madeleine Pownall

Two preprints from my PhD are now up!

Both ask: is the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) is measuring something distinct from the Revised Mathematics Anxiety Scale (R-MARS), or is this a jangle fallacy?

Study 1: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Study 2: osf.io/preprints/ps...

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

Recognising responsible supervision By Dr Tamarinde Haven, Assistant Professor in Research Methodology at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Why do we need to think more carefully about rewarding supervisors? Researcher evaluation …

Are you redesigning your promotion process for academic staff and looking for ways to assess more then 'number of completions' and 'attended mandatory training? supervisingphds.wordpress.com/2026/02/19/r...

Screenshot showing 557 downloads of the MORPHSS report

Our new report **Openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Documenting open research practices beyond STEM** has already had over 550 downloads!

If you haven't seen it yet but are interested in taking a look, you can find it here: doi.org/10.17613/jn1...

#morphss #OpenResearch #AHSS

As a pancake day treat, you can get 25% off the pre-order of Absent Minds this week! www.waterstones.com/book/absent-...

If progress is not to falter, students must be trained in open research The how and why of conducting transparent, rigorous, ethical research must be explicitly taught, say Madeleine Pownall, Charlotte Pennington and Flavio Azevedo

“Open research is about more than the tightening of analytical and methodological standards. The movement also invites us to reconsider how, and by whom, knowledge is created, shared and evaluated”

By @maddipow.bsky.social, @drcpennington.bsky.social, & @flavioazevedo.bsky.social

#MetaSci #OpenSci

It's not too late to register for the virtual SIPS@SPSP!

💡 Topics: Registered reports, open data, replications, diversity & inclusion
🧠 Hands-on sessions + hackathons

🗣️ Speakers:
🎤Christian Unkelbach, U of Cologne
🎤Yuichi Shoda, U of Washington
🎤Sakshi Ghai, U of Cambridge
buff.ly/Ks3VTJb

Metascience for whom? A question as old as science. Before we fix science, we need to ask who built it!

“We should be careful not to marginalise questions of power, because in wearing that aura of clean objectivity, metascience risks becoming strangely depoliticised.”

By @batoolmm.bsky.social

Call for Papers: Special Issue on The Future of Diamond Open Access: Possibilities, Perils, and Pathways Abstract submission deadline: March 23rd 2026 In recent years, Diamond Open Access (OA) has risen to the fore in the ongoing exploration of which knowledge production models are both ideal …

"Through this special issue, we invite broader discussion on Diamond OA and its future(s), from the highly conceptual to the deeply infrastructural. What is next for Diamond OA as it oscillates between the potential for either a technocratic or community-led and commons-based future?"

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Awards It is important to recognise the labour and commitment involved in improving psychological science, including through research (both academic and non-academic), tools, practice, science communicati…

Nominate a Project for a SIPS Award! 🏆
Help us recognize contributions to improving psychological science!

💡 SIPS Awards honor impactful projects—not individuals—because collective work drives progress. 🌍✨

Psychology needs a… revolution | BPS Our editor Jon Sutton introduces a special collection, with your views...

Psychology needs a… revolution
www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...
@maddipow.bsky.social @richardwiseman.bsky.social @joakimsundh.bsky.social @jamiecummins.bsky.social @lizstokoe.bsky.social @margaritap.bsky.social and others…

If progress is not to falter, students must be trained in open research, say Madeleine Pownall, Charlotte Pennington and Flavio Azevedo
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/if-progress-not-falter-students-must-be-trained-open-research

"Scientific literacy has long been a cornerstone of higher education but the open research movement has redefined what it means to be literate as a researcher" with @flavioazevedo.bsky.social & @drcpennington.bsky.social

www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/if-p...

Psychology needs a… humility revolution | BPS Madeleine Pownall argues that Psychology is ‘necessarily limited and incomplete’.

Humility Revolution

"Humility is not a threat to scientific authority; it is a strength. It shows disciplinary maturity, intellectual honesty, and methodological pluralism. A humility revolution must, surely, lead to better science."

By @maddipow.bsky.social

#PsycSci #MetaSci #Methodology

Me too. And did I miss the meeting where we all decided that novelty is a “key virtue of research” because I don’t subscribe to that idea at all

Yes, me too!

New on Cultures of Trial and Error:

Open Science isn’t just a set of reforms, but also a story about science in crisis, heroes, urgency, and repair. In this post, Sheena Bartscherer looks at the narrative side of (Open) Science, and why these stories matter

blog.trialanderror.org/cultures-of-...

Melania review – Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest Dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing – there is a decent documentary to be made about the former model from Slovenia, but this one is unredeemable

Brilliant writing! "It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch"

www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...

Special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology Edited by Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke, Eileen Joy and Lisa Trainor Call for papers New developments and good practice in reflexive thematic analysis The year 2026 is the 20th anniversary of the publication of the paper Using thematic analysis in psychology in Qualitative Research in Psychology. This paper has gone on to be the most cited qualitative methodological paper of all time according to an analysis by the journal Nature. Reflexive thematic analysis (TA) has transformed the practice of qualitative research in and beyond psychology. This Special Issue will mark this anniversary by exploring good practice and new developments in reflexive TA. We invite both full length papers and shorter commentaries and reflections from psychology and related disciplines. Potential topics include: • The use of reflexive TA to analyse visual and multimodal data • Is an N of one possible? The use reflexive TA in case study research • Beyond consensus and theme agreement: Strategies for using reflexive TA when there is more than one analyst • The use of reflexive TA in creative and arts-based research • The use of reflexive TA in Indigenous research • The use of reflexive TA in participatory designs (including participants as co-analysts) • Extensions of reflexive TA (e.g., frameworks and guidance for interpretative analysis) • Reviews of good (and poor) practice • Combining reflexive TA with other approaches (e.g., combining reflexive TA and narrative analysis; reflexive TA and discourse analysis) • “Behind the scenes”: Reflections on doing reflexive TA • Using reflexive TA in constructionist, critical realist or mixed methods research • Can reflexive TA be a feminist method? A queer method? A critical race theory method? • Doing deductive reflexive TA

• Good practice in teaching and supervising reflexive TA • Methodological pluralism and reflexive TA • Power relations and the politics of interpretation in reflexive TA Abstract submission deadline: 29 May 2026 Submit a maximum 500 word abstract to: Victoria.Clarke@uwe.ac.uk Deadline for paper submissions: 30 November 2026 Please contact any of the editors to discuss potential submissions: V.Braun@auckland.ac.nz; Victoria.Clarke@uwe.ac.uk; Eileen.Joy@auckland.ac.nz; L.R.Trainor@swansea.ac.uk Please note that we do not anticipate having a focus on the use of GenAI in reflexive TA as a Special Issue of QRIP on GenAI in qualitative research is currently in progress.

I'm excited to share a Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology on New developments and good practice in reflexive thematic analysis co-edited by me, @ginnybraun.bsky.social @eileenjoy.bsky.social and Lisa Trainor. Please contact any of us if you have any questions.

What an important topic - when there are such threats and pressures.

Thank you and ditto!

The Call for Papers is up! 📣

"What does the future of rigorous qualitative research look like in an era of open science, generative AI, increasing authoritarianism/geopolitical shifts, climate crisis and increasing concerns around research security?"

think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issu...

I invited my lovely high-school English teacher to the launch of my book and she said she would love to come. In related news, I cried in my office today

Exciting looking cfp for #qualitative researchers

Private jets, parties and eugenics: Jeffrey Epstein's bizarre world of scientists The billionaire financier and convicted sex offender famously mixed with presidents, models and film stars. But he also indulged his unorthodox beliefs by cultivating top scientists

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019...

For us lady scholars, who have been known to critique homogenous male academic cliques and spaces as exclusionary… consider the money and elite networks that ALL these men benefitted from. All because those lady scholars were likely a bit less interested in sexually assaulting 14 year old girls.

It's disturbing to see many of the the major figures in moral cognition all over the Epstein files

He was friendly with a huge number of the leading figures in the field, including giving millions to their labs, long after he pled guilty to sexually abusing young girls
www.justice.gov/epstein

If nothing else, academic institutions should oust everyone who's named in these files, no questions asked. If someone's moral compass is so broken, how can you trust the integrity of their work (see Ariely)? How can you let them supervise young women? They should be stripped of all accolades too.

SIPS 2026 Funding Opportunities Please read the information below about each funding opportunity before applying. If you have any questions, you can reach out to sips@improvingpsych.org

Don't let the lack of funding stop you from attending #SIPS2026!

SIPS has made a limited number of grants available to support SIPS members to attend the SIPS 2026 Meeting:
💸Student and postdoc travel support
💸Diversity travel support
💸Internet/technology funds (online SIPS)

Apply by Feb 6!