Notice anything strange about this table? It’s from a paper reporting results from an experiment conducted by Anthropic on the impact of AI assistance on coding skills. The Anthropic website writes: “participants in the AI group finished about two minutes faster, although the difference was not statistically significant.
One of the students in my Social Science Literacy class asked: how can I tell if a published article is peer reviewed? The student assumed that a having gone through peer review indicates research quality. The student is not alone. Many people think that ‘peer reviewed’ means that the quality is good.
Why is it that higher educated individuals are more likely to engage in blood donation, charitable giving and volunteer work? You might think it has something to do with what you get from going to school: the knowledge gained and skills trained in education.
The global productivity increase in science is reducing the willingness of researchers to perform peer review. To bring the production of manuscripts and reviews in line with each other, I propose a global publishing credit club. Members of the club receive credits for peer review reports that they complete.
A dashboard of transparency indicators signaling trustworthiness Our Research Transparency Check (Bekkers et al., 2025) rests on two pillars. The first pillar is the development of Metacheck (formerly known as Papercheck, DeBruine &
While reviewing a paper, I suddenly remembered the first replication of an experimental study I ever conducted. It’s 25 years old. In March 2000, I taught a workshop for a sociology class of 25 undergraduate students at Utrecht University.
As the wave of LLM generated research swells, how can you tell whether it is legit?
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