Numbed by numbers
Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, 'How to win a Nobel prize: wh…
Elisabeth Bik
6 posts
NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions
Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh's words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don…
NCBS retraction – addenda
My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I'd like to add. a. Why didn't the edito…
The costs of correction
I was slightly disappointed to read a report in the New York Times this morning. Entitled 'Two Huge COVID-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms', it discussed the implications…
Distracting from the peer-review problem
From an article entitled ‘The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research‘ published by Reuters: A Reuters analysis found that at least 153 studies – including epidemiological papers, genetic ana…
To see faces where there are none
This week in "neither university press offices nor prestigious journals know what they're doing": a professor emeritus at Ohio University who claimed he had evidence of life on Mars, and…