flynn002

Yesterday, a piece in Retractionwatch covered a new study, in which results of automated statistics checks on 50,000 psychology papers are to be made public on the PubPeer website. I had advance warning, because a study of mine had been included in what was presumably a dry run, and this led to me receiving an email on 26 th August as follows: Assuming someone had a critical comment on this paper, I duly clicked on the link, and had a moment of double-take when I read the comment. Now, this seemed like overkill to me, and I posted a rather grumpy tweet about it. There was a bit of to and fro on Twitter with Chris Hartgerink, one of the researchers on the Statcheck project, and with the folks at Pubpeer, where I explained why I was grumpy and they defended their approach; as far as I was concerned it was not a big deal, and if nobody else found this odd, I was prepared to let it go. But then a couple of journalists got interested, and I sent them a more detailed thoughts. I was quoted...

The Microsoft application, Excel, was in the news for all the wrong reasons last week.   A paper in Genome Biology documented how numerous scientific papers had errors in their data because they had used default settings in Excel, which had unhelpfully converted gene names to dates or floating point numbers. It was hard to spot as it didn't do it to all gene names, but, for instance, the gene Septin 2, with acronym SEPT2 would be turned into 2006/09/02.   This is not new: this paper in 2004 documented the problem, but it seems many people weren't aware of it, and it is now estimated that the literature on genetics is riddled with errors as a consequence.  This isn't the only way Excel can mess up your data. If you want to enter a date, you need to be very careful to ensure you have the correct setting. If you are in the UK and you enter a date like 23/4/16, then it will be correctly entered as 23rd April, regardless of the setting. But if you enter 12/4/16, it will be t...