Academia

Of course there is no monster in Loch Ness (despite what the university’s Press Office might want you to believe)

Yesterday, we had lots of news headlines concerning the Loch Ness monster, proving that the silly season is still a thing. (After all, it’s not as though there is actually anything important going on in the world right now.) Virtually all the headlines focused on the same catchy notion: It […]

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Authors defend statistical errors, editor sees no evil

Let’s have another go, shall we? Last December we wrote about a paper published in Occupational Medicine, in which the following information was presented in a table: The study concerned a group of patients who were scrutinised at two time-points, firstly at “baseline”, and secondly at “follow-up”. That is basically […]

people working in a call center

Time to flatten the curve of shoddy COVID scholarship

Last October, I wrote that COVID-19 had created a stampede of shoddy research. Little has changed in the interim. Putting all hands to the pump might feel appropriate in a crisis, but during a global public health emergency, rushing headlong into the scholarly frontline is anything but okay. Frankly, it is […]

Apart from the sampling ambiguity, weak measurement, survivor bias, missing data, and lack of control group, the study wasn’t that bad

David Tuller and I have written a response to an alarming research paper that appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. We have posted a preprint with the Open Science Foundation, and David has also posted the text in full over on Virology […]

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Beware the COVID-sceptic doctors

It turns out that not all medical doctors are infallible. Who knew? Some of them, it seems, dally at the margins of pseudoscience. Take for example the latest BMJ Op-Ed from the doctor who cured himself of long COVID. He says he did so through positive thinking. Go him! ‘Pseudoscience’ is […]