Daniel Lakens

In the last 2 years I (and our lovely collaborators) have been rather obsessively working on Metacheck - a tool to automatically check best practices in papers. In this RIOTS summerschool talk, I walk you through what the tool can do, and future plans www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWd2...

If a paper is written by multiple authors, and one is more famous than the rest, it is so insulting to act as if all the ideas in the paper come from the famous researcher. It is an important tell if you see a scientist do this.

Thanks for the interest, everyone! We now have enough editors and data managers to try the software out for a while. You can still reach out if you are interested, and we will get back when we know we can manage and support the current users!

The Journal of Sports Sciences will require open data from 2027: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... All journals will move to this requirement (the higher quality and the better the editor, the sooner). Make sure you are ready for this change by learning best practices.

Metacheck is now hosted by Surf! This offers us the possibility to offer an all in one online solution. Before we advertise this more, we would love to trial the new tool with data managers and editors of Diamond open access journals who want to try out automated checks. Especially of data and code.

Today we will for the first time grade master students in our Metascience course based on an oral exam. The completed weekly assignments, and we will quiz them on what they learned. It's our way to AI proof the course. Curious about how it will work out!

Great to see economists realize that, they too, need Registered Reports. Funny how each field goes through the same movements, but sometimes a decade apart. If everyone would work more with medical researchers, we would collectively win a decade or 2 in these discussions.

The NIH introduces a new tool ("Linked Discoveries" button) to help users learn whether a biomedical research finding has been reproduced. The button will now appear next to papers in the PubMed abstracts database, @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social reports for Science Magazine. #SciSky #MedSky 🧪

Registration for our hybrid symposium on the work of research ethics committees in the social and behavioral sciences at @cais-research.bsky.social with @lakens.bsky.social, Hella von Unger, and Christian Merz on Nov 25th is still possible until Nov 6th: eveeno.com/320501318

Why does open science matter in kidney research? Making research transparent, accessible, and reusable can improve reproducibility, collaboration, and scientific progress. #OpenScience #FAIRData #KidneyResearch #PICKEDproject

Rolf Zwaan, discussing some low quality criticism on the replication studies he is planning by scientists on bluesky: "Those who wrote the Bluesky posts produced misinformation. Those who liked those posts fell for the misinformation." rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/a-case-of-...

Statistical power is a property of an analysis, not a study. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Rolf Zwaan, discussing some low quality criticism on the replication studies he is planning by scientists on bluesky: "Those who wrote the Bluesky posts produced misinformation. Those who liked those posts fell for the misinformation." rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/a-case-of-...

@lakens.bsky.social has changed my mind in the past (like returning to vegetarianism) and I can see more ways now that AI might fit into my workflow. Although I'll probably always lean more towards wanting to understand the intricacies of code so I can wield that knowledge for things AI can't do.

"I work with collaborators whose opinions and values are important to me, and several of them are more skeptical about the use of AI." I think I might be one of those collaborators :)

"STOP ELSEVIER CONTRACT" A little bit of activism during the Open Science Festival today, during the opening plenary. Inspired by the session on activism yesterday at the OS Barcamp, awesome to see action being taken directly!

At the National Open Science Festival, already very happy to meet so many people working on opening up our science. We will be presenting Metacheck in a hands on workshop later today.

The slow and validation focused development of metacheck is one of the reasons I am so excited about it. I don't mind waiting for high quality. But I sure dislike sloppy work, and having slop thrown at me at a faster speed doesn't make me dislike it less.

This post does a great job of articulating why the development and release of metacheck has been pretty slow compared to other tools. One of our core values is validation, which is one of the things that has not been made a lot faster by LLMs. www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/#o...

Medical Teacher is the first health professions education journal to adopt Registered Reports. In this model, study plans are peer-reviewed before data collection, with publication decisions based on methodological rigor rather than the nature of the findings. Read more: www.tandfonline.com/...

We have a new, funded visiting scholars program for 2 scholars per semester to visit Minnesota. Generous monthly stipend, office space and connections with the wide-ranging and multidisciplinary MCPS community. Deadline to apply: Mon 7 Dec 2026. More info online. buff.ly/S9g6wG4

We formed an adversarial style collaboration to explore this topic for one of my graduate seminars, and it's been very illuminating. Feel free to peruse and reuse. In progress, but I think the pedagogical approach will resonate with your group social-science-collaboratory.github.io/AI_in_scienc...

Researchers often can't increase the size of their sample (e.g., due to research constraints). In my paper on sample size justification I discuss approaches to increase power without increasing the sample size (e.g., within designs, reducing variability) lakens.github.io/statistical_...

this whole "professors indoctrinate our youth" nonsense needs to stop. That line of argument infantilizes grown adults. The reality is that if we faculty could successfully indoctrinate students, they'd all know the syllabus for each course chapter and verse. Good luck with that, I always say.

New episode of Nullius in Verba! We discuss the 1959 Rede Lecture "The Two Cultures" by C. P. Snow. We reflect on whether there is still a divide between the humanities and the sciences, and how important it is to be educated in both. Enjoy! nulliusinverba.podbean.com/e/episode-85...

Researchers often can't increase the size of their sample (e.g., due to research constraints). In my paper on sample size justification I discuss approaches to increase power without increasing the sample size (e.g., within designs, reducing variability) lakens.github.io/statistical_...

In preparation for a discussion with the lab on AI use tomorrow morning, I thought I would come prepared and write down my thoughts in a blog post: How I use AI in my work daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/10/how-...

Dear Americans, the Trump government statements about the ICC, combined with the Diesel deal with Russia, are massive for Europeans. It is increasingly difficult for me to see what you need to more actively resist your government. Take a lesson from countries that know how to protest.

All Trump’s overseas assets should be frozen. Hotels. Golf courses. Offshore accounts. Should not be permitted to enter the territories of the countries that are parties to ICC.

For a metascience project I am trying to download files from Dryad (a popular data sharing platform in ecology). The platform has such strict API limitations that it is unusable for anything else than a single manual download. Please use Zenodo instead. Dryad is horrible.

Now Laura Caquelin is talking at the Paul Meehl Graduate School symposium talking about computational reproducibility, with the results of a randomized controlled trial of reproducibility review.

Now Simon Nolte talking about automated extraction. He is discussing how accuracy, scalability, and transparency should be principles, but difficult to achieve all 3 at the same time.

Now Joeri Tijdink is talking about wellbeing and research waste in academia. You can jump in the live feed to follow along!

The Paul Meehl Graduate School Symposium is kicking off with a keynote by the Best Thesis Award winner Charlotte Rulkens on the role of replications in the Humanities, studying the repetition of art attribution.

1247 preprints have now received a recommendation from one of the 21 thematic PCI! Behind every recommendation is a community of researchers contributing their expertise. Could your preprint be next? 👉 Submit your research to PCI: peercommunityin.org/submit-a-pre...

Looking forward to a fun first day of the Paul Meehl graduate school symposium full of workshops and hackathons and social events! docs.google.com/document/u/0...

Dear academics, if you want your book to be read, you publish it open access online for free (e.g. a quarto book). If you write a book no one needs to read and that you are writing purely to get tenure, send it to a publishers who sells prestige (without adding any value).

9 days left to submit an abstract to the 9th edition of the Perspectives on Scientific Error conference that will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, 27–29 January 2027, errorsin.science. It's my favorite conference combining philosophy of science, metascience, and statistics.

Delighted to announce the Irish Reproducibility Network's latest online event . Prof. Lai Ma (UCD) will talk about "JD Bernal's Preprint Proposal at the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference" Oct 20th, 1200. Registration is free, via EventBrite www.eventbrite.ie/e/irish-repr...

#BTSCON2026 starts soon! We can’t wait to celebrate another year of big team science with all of you! 🥰 @psysciacc.bsky.social @manybabies.org @manyprimates.bsky.social @manydogsproject.bsky.social @manylanguagesc.bsky.social @cos.io @forrt.bsky.social @abrir.bsky.social @reproducibilitea.org

The latest PCI Webinar is now freely available online! Many thanks to Daniël Lakens for an insightful webinar entitled “Essential aspects of well-designed studies”. For those who couldn’t join us live, the recording is now available: peercommunityin.org/pci-webinar-...

Check the program here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

We are excited to announce that we are going to broadcast the second day of Meta-Research Symposium 2026 (this Friday on October 9th) for those who were interested but unable to join in person. You can join the meeting using this link: teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-joi...

Meer onderzoeksjournalisten in het wetenschappelijk debat! Wetenschappers zouden moeten opletten hoe onderzoeksjournalisten te werk gaan. Fouten meteen corrigeren. Bepaalde uitgevers de rug toe keren. Beroepseer hooghouden met focus op kritiek geven en ontvangen. neerlandistiek.nl/2026/10/geen...

We are excited to announce that we are going to broadcast the second day of Meta-Research Symposium 2026 (this Friday on October 9th) for those who were interested but unable to join in person. JOIN: teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-joi... PROGRAM: docs.google.com/document/u/0...

New preprint: When should you use linear mixed models (LMMs), and when is repeated-measures (RM) ANOVA enough? LMMs offer greater flexibility. But does that make them a better default? My paper argues for statistical parsimony: use RM-ANOVA when both methods are appropriate. osf.io/preprints/ps...