By Natasha Karp To improve the reproducibility, we need to change the way we design our in vivo experiments To understand the effect of a treatment, our experiments simplify a complex world by generating control and treatment groups allowing us to isolate cause and effect. This generates an inference or testing space, which arises […]
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Every little helps: A personal journey into Open Science
By Alexandra Lautarescu (@AleLautarescu) Early career researchers are not powerless “Open science is not all or nothing. Incremental progress is still progress”. These are some of the sentences that have stuck with me to this day, over a year after I wandered into the Open Science room at a conference. Before that, I had […]
Leadership Training and Development – Academia’s Unmet Medical Need
By Nadia Soliman (@Nadia_Soliman_) A question, once posed to me, “Why do you think there aren’t more women in senior academic positions?” My answer, “lack of leadership.” The absence of women leaders in academia has far-reaching effects, not only within institutions, but also on the scope of research and generation of knowledge. Women are […]
Being a researcher: inspiration & curiosity to providing solutions
By Mohamed Boudjelal The factors marking the similarities between a scientist, sportsperson and a politician are their ability to produce results, cut to the chase, lead and follow what inspired them the most. The characteristic that distinguishes the scientist from the rest, is the eagerness to discover how a certain phenomenon came about, and […]
Can we predict the reproducibility of biomedical studies?
By Olavo Amaral Awareness of reproducibility issues in various areas of science has been on the rise in recent years, with systematic replication efforts in areas such as psychology, economics, cancer biology and social sciences arising in recent years. The low reproducibility rates in some of these areas raise the question of whether irreproducible […]
Redesigning translational epilepsy research
By Sloka Iyengar A basic scientist in the clinic After nine years studying epilepsy, and despite deep immersion into the scientific literature and scientific methodology of epilepsy, I had yet to see a person experiencing seizures. This all changed on my first day as a clinical researcher, where I met Kevin – a boy […]
FORCE2019: Establishing a shared vision for preprints
This blog is cross-posted from ASAPbio and reused under CC-BY 4.0 license. Please add any comments and annotations on the original post at asapbio.org/force2019-preprints-vision-dinner. Following a panel discussion about “Who will influence the success of preprints in biology and to what end?” at FORCE2019 (summarised here), we continued the discussion over dinner with […]
Genuine replication and pseudoreplication: what’s the difference?
By Stanley E. Lazic (@StanLazic) Replication is a key idea in science and statistics, but is often misunderstood by researchers because they receive little education or training on experimental design. Consequently, the wrong entity is replicated in many experiments, leading to pseudoreplication or the “unit of analysis” problem [1,2]. This results in exaggerated sample […]
Response: Let’s work together to explore the evidence base for all preclinical research methodologies
In response to: Drug discovery and preclinical drug development – have animal studies really failed? By Pandora Pound and Merel Ritskes-Hoitinga A case of the ‘straw man’? We came across this blog in BMJ Open Science by chance this week. The blog, entitled ‘Drug discovery and preclinical drug development – have animal studies really […]
Diversity in science isn’t just about the workforce – it is about the research itself
By Natasha Karp When you hear the phrase “diversity in science”, you typically think about the efforts to create a diverse and inclusive scientific workforce. However, it is also about the research we conduct. For over twenty years [1] papers have been raising an issue that we have a sex bias as the research community […]