Episodes
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148: Academic reference letters
January 31st, 2022 | 51 mins 47 secs
Dan and James chat about why academic reference letters are terrible, a recent position statement on preprints, and whether the "great resignation" is also happening in academia.
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147: The $7000 golden ticket
January 17th, 2022 | 54 mins 27 secs
We discuss the $7000 'accelerated publication' option for some Taylor & Francis journals that promises 3-5 week publication, and a novel type of research fellowship from New Science
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146: Skills pay bills
December 27th, 2021 | 1 hr 9 mins
We answer a series of questions from a listener on whether to start a PhD, what to ask potential supervisors, the financial perils of being a PhD student, the future of higher education, the importance of skills, what keeps us going, and more
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145: Our boat is sinking slightly slower
December 13th, 2021 | 48 mins 4 secs
We discuss the results from the cancer biology reproducibility project, the inevitable comparisons with reproducibility in psychology, and authorship expectations for posting open datasets.
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144: The role of luck in academia
November 15th, 2021 | 53 mins 57 secs
If your child asked you whether they should pursue a career in academia, what would you say? We discuss this question along three more quick-fire topics: the death of expertise, memorable presentations, and the lack of internship options in most graduate programs
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143: A little less conversation, a little more action
November 1st, 2021 | 54 mins 32 secs
Dan and James discuss the differences between 'talk' and 'action' in scientific reform and why reforms are taking such a long time to be realised. They also chat about whether messy (but correct) code is worse than no code at all, and revisit the grad student who never said "no".
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142: Red flags in academia [Live episode]
October 18th, 2021 | 57 mins 12 secs
In this live episode, Dan and James discuss red flags in academia, in terms of research fields, papers, and individuals.
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141: Why we should diversify study samples (with Sakshi Ghai)
October 4th, 2021 | 57 mins 9 secs
We chat with Sakshi Ghai (University of Cambridge) about why we should diversify sample diversity and retire the Western, educated, rich, industrialized and democratic (WEIRD) dichotomy in the behavioral sciences
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140: You can’t buy cat biscuits with ‘thank you’ emails
September 20th, 2021 | 1 hr 1 min
James proposes that peer review reports should be published as their own citable objects, provided that the manuscript author thinks that the peer review report is of sufficient quality and the peer reviewers agree
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139: Open science from a funder's perspective (with Ashley Farley)
September 6th, 2021 | 56 mins 26 secs
We chat with Ashley Farley about her background as an academic librarian, the underrecognised importance of copyright in academic publishing, and her work as a Program Officer at the Gates Foundation
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138: Preprints in the time of coronavirus (with Michele Avissar-Whiting)
August 16th, 2021 | 1 hr 6 mins
We chat with Michele Avissar-Whiting about her role as the Editor-in-chief of the Research Square preprint platform and how she weighs up the benefits and costs of potentially problematic preprints during a pandemic
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137: Ten rules for improving academic work-life balance
August 2nd, 2021 | 53 mins 21 secs
Dan and James share their thoughts on a recent paper that proposes ten rules for improving academic work-life balance for early career researchers and the figure from this paper that became a meme.
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136: Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewed journals?
July 19th, 2021 | 50 mins 29 secs
We discuss Journal Reviewer (journalreviewer.org), which is a website that provides a forum for researchers to share and rate their experiences with journal's peer review processes. We also cover how some journals negotiate the way in which their impact factors are calculated
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135: A loss of confidence
July 5th, 2021 | 50 mins 53 secs
Dan Quintana and James Heathers chat about well-known psychology studies that we've now lost confidence in due to replication failures and the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis-driven research.
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134: Paywalled questionnaires
June 21st, 2021 | 56 mins 39 secs
We discuss a recent retraction triggered by the authors not paying a copyright fee to use a questionnaire (that also happened to be critical of the original questionnaire).
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133: Manuscript submission fees
June 7th, 2021 | 49 mins 8 secs
Some journals use nominal manuscript submission fees to discourage frivolous submissions. However, it has been suggested that increasing submission fees could reduce article processing charges. Dan and James discuss this proposal, along with the recently released code of conduct for scientific integrity from the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.