As the wave of LLM generated research swells, how can you tell whether it is legit? A fast growing proportion of science contains results generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI. Researchers rely on virtual assistants to do their literature reviews, summarize previous research, and write texts for journal articles (Kwon, 2025). As a result, AI generated research swells to immense proportions.

While the replication crisis is leading to changes in journal policies and data transparency practices in psychology, political science and economics, nothing much happens in sociology. Do we have nothing to worry about because research in sociology is more replicable than in other fields? Perhaps. We don’t really know because very few studies in sociology are ever replicated.

What could meta research learn from criminology for the prevention of research integrity violations? What insights does criminology provide in causes and prevention of research integrity violations? In a seminar (slides here) at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), I discussed with researchers in criminology how theories and findings from the field may be applied in the field of meta research.

“Thank you for the invitation to review the manuscript you’ve received for possible publication in your journal. I will consider your request only if the data and code that produce the results reported are available in a publicly accessible repository.” This is my new default response to invitations to review manuscripts for academic journals.

Over de zin van impact en het impact meten

How reliable is our knowledge on mechanisms that make people give? In a webinar organized by the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP) on December 10, 2024, I’ve given a preliminary answer to this question. The slides are here. With a group of scholars we seek to identify which results have successfully been replicated in research that was conducted since the 2007 Science of Generosity working paper (Bekkers &

Check out Detecting Bad Science, a new website I’ve created to help you identify weaknesses in empirical research reports. For each weakness you’ll find suggestions to avoid or repair it, or mitigate its consequences. The materials help you evaluate the quality of research in the social and behavioral sciences. You’ll also learn how to improve research designs and reports.

Looking back at my career thus far, I see four things that helped me advance in academia: freedom, help from others, coincidence, and quirkiness. Plus privilege, health, naive optimism, and openness.

It’s time for a career split: in the coming years, I am adding meta science and research integrity as a second line of research, next to the science of philanthropy. It’s a split, not a switch. I’m far from done with research on research on philanthropy and will keep working on it the Department of Sociology at VU Amsterdam.

Why is the share of income and wealth that people give to charities lower when their income and wealth are higher? Are more generous persons less likely to accumulate wealth? Or does wealth make people care less about those in need? Can fundraising organizations increase generosity by soliciting gifts in different ways? Fifteen years of data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey (Bekkers, De Wit &

Both in the Netherlands and in the USA, generosity has been declining in the past years. In the USA, the value of donations in 2023 declined by 2.1%, adjusted for inflation, according to recent findings from Giving USA. We found a similar decline in generosity in the Netherlands. The value of donations in 2022 reached an all-time low of 0.62% of GDP. The Netherlands gave about € 5.3 billion to charitable causes in the year 2022.