For this month's SORTEE webinar, Dr. Joel Pick presents a talk on the role of journals in fighting the replication crisis.

Summary:

As with many other quantitative fields, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are facing a crisis. We are surrounded by low powered studies and strong publication bias, and work in an inequitable research environment which incentivises questionable research practices. As a consequence, the published literature is full of inflated effects sizes and false positives, and fails to provide a good representation of research conducted and, ultimately, the phenomena we study. This ‘replication crisis’ is the antithesis of what we aim to achieve as academics.

While many researchers either do not realise the potential scale of this crisis, or choose to bury their heads in the sand, journals are in a unique position to change the way we conduct and communicate our research. When working effectively, journals, and the peer review system, is often considered a gatekeeper of quality - we presume that published, peer-reviewed papers are generally higher quality, and have undergone more scrutiny than, for example, pre-prints. We now need journals to be a further gatekeeper of credibility, and act to increase the transparency, and so trust, in science.

In this webinar, I will outline several steps that journals can take to help move us from a replication crisis to a credibility revolution. I will focus on three main aspects: Replication studies (tackling the replication crisis head on), Registered Reports (fighting the causes of the crisis; low power and publication bias), and Data and code quality control (increasing reproducibility and building trust).

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