Category: 1.1 Research (General)

Together with a psychologist, I’m currently performing a comparatively simple interview study about the effectiveness of a software engineering method. Proper procedure is paramount in psychology, so we submitted an ethics review request to my employer’s institutional (ethics) review board. I didn’t think we’d need the ethics approval, and lo and behold the ethics board…

There, it happened again. An associate editor of a prestigious software engineering journal rejected our paper, because they wouldn’t overrule a single bogus review. In the current case, all reviewers were on plain accept, with one holdout, reviewer 2, who recommended a plain reject. (The paper was the first revised version of the original submission.)…

Let’s assume you are a scientist, collaborating with another scientist on some research project that will lead to exactly one article (to keep things simple). How should you go about involving further scientists, perhaps to perform even stronger research? The answer is simple, if you work from first principles. Here there are the two key…

tl;dr The individual researcher typically is, but science as a community of peers isn’t. (For caveats see bottom of post.) This post was inspired by a social media post by Prem Devanbu. Individual scientists naturally have opinions, ambitions, and hopes, and this influences the research questions they chase and the hypotheses they frame. Despite many…