Ian Hussey
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ianhussey.mmmdata.io
Ian Hussey
@ianhussey.mmmdata.io

Meta-scientist and psychologist. Senior lecturer @unibe.ch‬. Chief recommender @error.reviews. "Jumped up punk who hasn't earned his stripes." All views a product of my learning history. If behaviorism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. .. more

Psychology 66%
Sociology 10%
Pinned
Lego Science is research driven by modular convenience.

When researchers combine methods or concepts, more out of convenience than any deep curiosity in the resulting research question, to create publishable units.

"What role does {my favourite construct} play in {task}?"

Reposted by Ian Hussey

I built an R package that turns Shiny apps into UIs that render directly inside Claude Desktop or ChatGPT.

It's called shinymcp. Drop-downs, plots, tables all inline in the chat.

github.com/jameshwade/shinymcp

Reposted by Ian Hussey

Here's my conversation with Mu Yang on Metascience Matters: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2EK...

We discussed her work as a scientific sleuth, academic incentives for positive data, individual cases she has pursued, and why she loves being a sleuth.

Also on Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/16R6...
300+ retractions, image manipulation, and why science should be boring | Metascience Matters #3
YouTube video by Metascience Matters
www.youtube.com

{psychdsish} R package to create standardized structured projects for psychological research projects processed and analyzed in R:

github.com/ianhussey/ps...

Reposted by James E. Bartlett

Early draft of my ebook for the course:

ianhussey.quarto.pub/reproducible...

Basic questions like "how many participants are in the dataset?" can produce surprisingly different answers between analysts.

Results from students in my class in data wrangling in tidyverse, who are good at wrangling but still have to make semi-subjective choices:
dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...
dplyr 1.2.0
dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...
tidyverse.org
Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

"We, the arbiters of correction notices, retractions, and future publications - the major reinforcers for academics - have no levers to pull on to enforce this" 👀

If failure to supply data upon request after committing to do so resulted in a correction notice, researchers would comply immediately.
Don't you f**king dare.

If you're interested in data sleuthing but aren't sure where to start,

or if you're conducting a systematic review/meta-analysis and want to ensure you're not including junk studies,

check out this Cochrane training session on Trustworthiness Assessment by @jdwilko.bsky.social
INSPECT-SR: A tool for assessing trustworthiness of randomised controlled trials | Cochrane
www.cochrane.org

Reposted by Ian Hussey

My own personal example of this for a study I got rejected in one place as a reviewer and then got published at another, unchanged.

Look at the two citations in the image. The years alone should give away they don't support the claim made in the paper.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is the difference between "the literature is a mess" in the sense of being able to integrate findings from different papers without fine grain additional info vs "individual papers in the literature are a mess". The analyses we provide show convincingly that the literature is a mess.
Wow this scoring chaos seems to be an extreme case of what I say about many ad hoc analyses: no derivation of method from a clear scientific theory, no assessment of statistical properties, and decades pass before someone notices. This happens in biology too, so let’s not pick on psychology only

Reposted by Ian Hussey

But data is available from the authors upon reasonable request. For a meta-research paper this is simply ridiculous
Honestly, read our paper more

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35623542/

8.0% of citations in the medical literature contain major errors.

E.g., the cited work makes the opposite claim or is unrelated to the claim in the citing article.
Systematic review and meta-analysis of quotation inaccuracy in medicine - Research Integrity and Peer Review
Background Quotations are crucial to science but have been shown to be often inaccurate. Quotation errors, that is, a reference not supporting the authors’ claim, may still be a significant issue in s...
link.springer.com

@anniria.bsky.social second attempt at tagging you

"you could - by careful choice of an existing scoring method from the literature - find any effect, or nothing, or the reverse of any effect you choose. This is bonkers. ... so extreme as to be farcical."

This is the sentiment we were hoping people would come away with!

w/@anniria.bsky.social

Separately, the COMPare project spent a lot of time tracking outcome switching and reporting it to journals, who usually did nothing about it. It was labor intensive, but @jamiecummins.bsky.social is working with them to create a semi-automated version of it as a branch of regcheck.

Out of interest, do you make a non-anonymised copy of your data available? Ie so that readers can know which specific trials have poorly specified outcomes?

Reposted by Ian Hussey

We spent time checking how outcomes are registered and reported in publication, using database of RCT in rheumatology.
The results just got published in Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Results aren't good ⬇️1/5

#MetaResearch #ClinicalTrials #Rheumatology
Adequacy of trial registration and consistency in outcome reporting in rheumatology RCTs: A meta-research study
Transparent reporting of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is essential to ensure research integrity. While registration practices of RCTs are impro…
www.sciencedirect.com

Reposted by Ian Hussey

❗📢 The SNSF is adjusting its project funding as of 1 April 2026. Our goal is to stabilise success rates at a level that ensures funding for research of the highest quality. This is how we guarantee a fair chance for all researchers.

➡️ sohub.io/5x59
Read my latest post for reflections on reproducibility, research quality and a summary of a great new study which shows how NOT to do it

https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/gambling-with-research-quality
Gambling with research quality
How you get 244 different ways to measure performance on the same test of decision making. And what it means for the reliability of behavioural science
tomstafford.substack.com

Reposted by Ian Hussey

Both kids are gone so naturally, I'm making the most of my precious free time.

Scrutiny web app for GRIM/GRIMMER: errors.shinyapps.io/scrutiny/

GitHub docs for R package: lhdjung.github.io/scrutiny/
Great talk from @lhdjung.bsky.social at the SwissRN Research-On-Research day on his, our, and other folks' work to develop trustworthiness assessment tools.

Finally his {scrutiny} R package has a logo!

Interesting work, thank you.
I don’t mean this as a whataboutism, but as a clarification. Am I right in thinking that undisclosed but apparently large speaking fees like this don’t come under this work’s definition of COI, as it focuses specifically on industry? bsky.app/profile/malt...
Fortunately, Conflict of Interest begins at $200,001

Reposted by Ian Hussey

Fortunately, Conflict of Interest begins at $200,001

I disagree with this take so hard that I will be dropping the long-held tradition of referring to the coefficient as Nivard-Spearman’s rho and will in future refer to it only as Spearman’s rho.

So we can find what you call inventive like systems inside cultures, and cultural systems implementing incentive structures. It’s a false dichotomy. The concept of Multilevel selection (eg Jablonka & Lamb’s evolution in 4 dimensions for intro) spells this out well, as well as adding parsimony.

And cultural inherence doesn’t happen magically either, it’s a description of a set of contingencies delivered by a community of individuals, sometimes inherited across generations.