Category Archives: Publishing in scientific journals

About publishing in scientific journals.

Publishing a Registered Report as an Undergraduate: An Interview with Tatiana Kvetnaya

In the past, we have talked a lot about Registered Reports and their potential to increase the rigor and reproducibility of psychological science (see here, here, and here). In a previous blog post, James Bartlett interviewed Dr. Hannah Hobson, who published a Registered Report as part of her PhD project.

In this blog post, we talk with Tatiana Kvetnaya who received her Bachelor degree from the University of Tübingen, and who is currently pursuing her graduate studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Excitingly, Tatiana recently published her bachelor thesis as a Registered Report with the Journal of European Psychology Students. Below, she recounts how she first came in contact with Registered Reports, her experience publishing one herself, and tips for students thinking about doing the same. Continue reading →

Fabian Dablander

Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.

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“Bullied Into Bad Science”: An Interview with Corina Logan

The last two years have seen a lot of talk about the issues of science and scientific publishing – and how the incentives prevalent in science (publish or perish, preferably with high-impact stories with lots of news coverage) are actually bad for science. Corina Logan, a zoologist and part of a group of postdocs from the University of Cambridge is eager to push for a change in the publishing culture. They argue that the current way of publishing is hindering the progress of science. A recent column by Brian Martinson in Nature summarises the problem nicely: “[The fact that researchers need publications encourages] all manner of corner-cutting, sloppiness in research, and other degradations in the quality of publications, not to mention an obvious motive for plagiarism. A quest for high-profile papers leads researchers to favour a spectacular result, even if it is specious. Authors cite themselves to boost the impact of publications, and cite colleagues to curry favour.” Continue reading →

Katharina Brecht

After finishing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Katharina is currently a Postdoc in the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen. Her research interests revolve around the mechanisms of social and causal cognition in animals.

Open online education: Research findings and methodological challenges

With a reliable internet connection comes access to the enormous World Wide Web. Being so large, we rely on tools like Google to search and filter all this information. Additional filters can be found in sites like Wikipedia, offering a library style access to curated knowledge, but it too is enormous. In more recent years, open online courses has rapidly become a highly popular method of gaining easy access to curated, high quality, as well as pre-packaged knowledge. A particularly popular variety is the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which are found on platforms like Coursera and edX. The promise – global and free access to high quality education – has often been applauded. Some have heralded the age of the MOOC as the death of campus based teaching. Others are more critical, often citing the high drop-out rates as a sign of failure, or argue that MOOCs do not or cannot foster ‘real’ learning (e.g., Zemsky, 2014; Pope, 2014). Continue reading →

Tim van der Zee

Skeptical scientist. I study how people learn from educational videos in open online courses, and how we can help them learn better. PhD student at Leiden University (the Netherlands), but currently a visiting scholar at MIT and UMass Lowell. You can follow me on Twitter: @Research_Tim and read my blog at www.timvanderzee.com

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Not solely about that Bayes: Interview with Prof. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

Last summer saw the publication of the most important work in psychology in decades: the Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration, 2015; see here and here for context). It stirred up the community, resulting in many constructive discussions but also in verbally violent disagreement. What unites all parties, however, is the call for more transparency and openness in research.

Eric-Jan “EJ” Wagenmakers has argued for pre-registration of research (Wagenmakers et al., 2012; see also here) and direct replications (e.g., Boekel et al., 2015; Wagenmakers et al., 2015), for a clearer demarcation of exploratory and confirmatory research (de Groot, 1954/2013), and for a change in the way we analyze our data (Wagenmakers et al., 2011; Wagenmakers et al., in press). Continue reading →

Fabian Dablander

Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.

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Publishing a Registered Report as a Postgraduate Researcher

Registered Reports (RRs) are a new publishing format pioneered by the journal Cortex (Chambers 2013). This publication format emphasises the process of rigorous research, rather than the results, in an attempt to avoid questionable research practices such as p-hacking and HARK-ing, which ultimately reduce the reproducibility of research and contribute to publication bias in cognitive science (Chambers et al. 2014). A recent JEPS post by Dablander (2016) and JEPS’ own editorial for adopting RRs (King et al. 2016) have given a detailed explanation of the RR process. However, you may have thought that publishing a RR is reserved for only senior scientists, and is not a viable option for a postgraduate student. In fact, 5 out of 6 of the first RRs published by Cortex have had post-graduate students as authors, and publishing by RR offers postgraduates and early career researchers many unique benefits. Continue reading →

James Bartlett

I'm James Bartlett, a PhD student at Coventry University, UK. The aim of my project is to create a profile of cognitive mechanisms associated with substance use in light and heavy smokers. I keep myself occupied outside of academia by playing hockey, or watching ice hockey. You can also find me on Twitter (@JamesEBartlett).

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Replicability and Registered Reports

Last summer saw the publication of a monumental piece of work: the reproducibility project (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). In a huge community effort, over 250 researchers directly replicated 100 experiments initially conducted in 2008. Only 39% of the replications were significant at the 5% level. Average effect size estimates were halved. The study design itself—conducting direct replications on a large scale—as well as its outcome are game-changing to the way we view our discipline, but students might wonder: what game were we playing before, and how did we get here? Continue reading →

Fabian Dablander

Fabian Dablander is doing a PhD at the Department of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at https://fdabl.github.io/.

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Meet the Authors

Do you wish to publish your work but don’t know how to get started? We asked some of our student authors, Janne Hellerup Nielsen, Dimitar Karadzhov, and Noelle Sammon, to share their experience of getting published. Continue reading →

Leonor Agan

Leonor is a postgraduate student at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (University of Edinburgh), pursuing a MSc in Neuroimaging for Research. She holds a BSc in Psychology from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and a BA in Psychology from Maynooth University in Ireland. She worked as a Research Assistant in Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (University College Dublin), and Psychology Department (University College Dublin). Her research interests include cognition, memory, and neuroimaging techniques, specifically diffusion MRI and its applications in disease. She is also an Editor of the Journal of European Psychology Students. Find her on Twitter @leonoragan and link in with her.

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