An independent, diamond open-access journal redefining failure.
95 articles
Rrita Bajraktari & Marcus Munafò
Scientific communication is often assumed to prioritize objectivity, yet persuasive strategies may subtly distort research interpretation. While the spread of errors in research is often attributed to methodological or statistical biases (Świątkowski & Dompnier, 2017), rhetorical strategies are less…
Florian Kohrt, Filip Melinscak, Richard McElreath & Felix Schönbrodt
Reproductions, which we define as “redoing activities” that work with the same collected data (or simulation source code) and aim to keep the computation as similar as possible, enable the verification of a scientific work. We seek to advance the understanding and conduct of reproductions by…
Sidney L. Tamm
A remarkable symbiotic protozoan in the hindgut of termites was accidentally discovered. Its head and body continuously rotated in opposite directions without stopping or reversing directions. Rotations included the plasma membrane of each part of the cell, and the membrane was continuous across the…
Mohammad Ali Nilforooshan
Nowadays, single-step genomic best linear unbiased prediction (ssGBLUP) is the most popular methodology for livestock genetic evaluation. It simultaneously evaluates genotyped and nongenotyped animals using an augmented genotype and pedigree relationship matrix. In most livestock species, a small…
Serge P. J. M. Horbach, Nicki Lisa Cole, Simone Kopeinik, Barbara Leitner, Tony Ross-Hellauer & Joeri Tijdink
Reproducibility of research is a hotly debated topic, including aspects like causes and consequences of low levels of reproducibility. While some research fields have led the way and introduced various reproducibility practices and procedures, the call for efforts to ‘improve’ reproducibility in…
Ayumi Ikeda, Fumiya Yonemitsu, Naoto Yoshimura, Kyoshiro Sasaki & Yuki Yamada
The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free and open-source platform for managing research projects (Elliott et al., 2021). The OSF is a flagship product of the Center for Open Science, Inc. (COS), whose mission is to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. It is…
François Léonard & Ezio Tirelli
Introduction: In recent decades, concerns have been raised about the validity and reliability of many research results. Inadequate research practices, including insufficient statistical power, have contributed to the replication crisis. The statistical tests of numerous studies in the…
Lukas K. Sotola
Affective polarization, people’s emotional attachment to their own party and dislike of rival parties, has been a growing area of interest in recent decades. However, studies on affective polarization have tended to use difference score measures to capture affective polarization. Specifically, it is…
Amber Copeland
In this manuscript, I provide a reflection on Bartlett et al.'s (2022) study, No Meaningful Difference in Attentional Bias Between Daily and Non-Daily Smokers . I begin with an overview of attentional bias and its measurement in addiction research, followed by a summary of the study by Bartlett et…
Mette Elise Tunset, Francis Combes & Hanne Haslene-Hox
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is hypothesized to play a role in the pathophysiology of psychosis. However, studying this structure in living humans is challenging due to limitations in current methods that fail to identify subtle changes or dysfunctions. We aimed to develop a method to isolate…
Stefan Gaillard, Stefan van Geelen, Elvire Landstra & Arno Hoes
Uncertainty is a daily reality in the health domain. Clinicians routinely face it when diagnosing patients, predicting outcomes, and selecting treatments in partnership with patients. Patients and their families, in turn, experience uncertainty about their condition and what the future may hold.…
Stefan Gaillard & Jip Prinsen
Due to a miscommunication in our publication workflow, a number of articles published over the past few months were incorrectly labeled, either in terms of article type or their (lack of) inclusion in a special issue. These errors have now been resolved, and measures have been taken to prevent…
Carsten F.J. Bakhuis & Marcel A.G. van der Heyden
In this reflection article, we evaluate a sub study of the STRIDER trial by Terstappen et al., which investigated the molecular effects of prenatal sildenafil administration in pregnancies complicated by fetal growth restriction (FGR). Unfortunately, this trial revealed no clinical benefit and even…
Falk Hübner, Gjilke Keuning & Marijke Lucas
In this article, the authors reflect on the co-creative processes of three artistic research residencies in an elderly care institution in Leiden, The Netherlands. The artists were asked to immerse themselves in the institution for half a year, 2 days a week, to carry out practice-based and…
Howard Browman, Seth S. Leopold & Kent R. Anderson
While acknowledging that peer review is imperfect, we argue that preprint servers, which disseminate non-peer-reviewed research, represent a significant risk to society. Preprints can lead to the spread of misinformation, undermine public trust in science, and contribute to harmful public health…
Robert P. L. Wisse
As a clinician-scientist, the journey through the PENTACON trial, a multicenter randomized clinical study comparing two surgical techniques for corneal transplantation in keratoconus patients, was both enlightening and challenging. The study, which served as the centerpiece of my PhD research in…
Robert P.L. Wisse, Cathrien A. Eggink, Bart T.H. van Dooren & Allegonda van der Lelij
The purpose of this research was to report on the surgical safety and outcomes of two distinct techniques of anterior lamellar corneal surgery: the Big Bubble Deep Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty (DALK) versus Busin’s Partial ENdothelial Trepanation (PET) in addition to anterior lamellar keratoplasty…
Folco Panizza, Thomas Camminga, Stefan Gaillard & David Joachim Grüning
Harjani et al. (2023) conducted a gamified inoculation intervention against misinformation in rural India. Despite the ingenuity of the intervention design, the study revealed no significant effects on participants' ability to detect misinformation, highlighting cultural and digital barriers to…
Moin Syed
If a study is preregistered, but nobody checks it during review, does it mean anything? The purpose of this preregistered study was to better understand how editors and reviewers engage with preregistration plans during the review process. The article set was retrieved from the PLOS family of…
Berent Prakken
“Boys we were - but good boys. If I may say so myself. We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” (Nescio, 2012)
Martijn van der Meer
Expert endorsement seems a promising tool in countering vaccine hesitancy. Yet findings from an experiment in the United Kingdom, published in this journal, found that repeated expert‐backed “debunking” messages had little effect on vaccination intentions or behaviors. At the same time, a similar…
Samantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
Koen Beumer’s narrative provides an interesting example of how surprise and expectations are inter-related in research, particularly when we branch into areas about which we may have assumptions but don’t have knowledge. A particularly rich context for this kind of surprise is in international…
Koen Beumer
The governance of risk is a highly technical endeavor. If we want to know whether a product like a chemical substance poses a risk to human health and should be regulated, we have to conduct laboratory tests under highly controlled conditions. We may for example expose a number of mice to the…
Wendy Ross
This anecdote reports a discovery in the real time implementation of thermic biomass gasification made after an undergraduate student noticed an unanticipated consequence of taking a shortcut. It is a good example of the necessary combination of accident and sagacity in a serendipitous event. The…
Maximilian Roßmann
This is the story of my serendipitous invention of a popcorn effect in thermal biomass gasification and the role of scientific imagination. In 2011, during my time at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg, I embarked on a project that would unexpectedly lead to a small…
Sarahanne Field, Stefan D.M. Gaillard, David Joachim Grüning & Alex Job Visser
In most industries, error is a problem. Take, for instance, the aviation industry. An error in the calculation of a plane’s gross weight could be catastrophic, as how much a plane weighs directly influences how it needs to be configured for take-off and landing. Countless fatal aviation accidents…
Anne Margit Reitsema, Sanne Nijhof & Odilia Laceulle
Part of Special Issue: Scientific Failure and Uncertainty in the Health Domain.
Mark Rubin
The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p -hacking are thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and,…
Helge Giese & Laura M König
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study participation is usually incentivized using monetary (e.g., fixed or performance-contingent payment) or non-monetary (e.g., feedback) compensation. This study investigates the impact of this incentivization on recruitment, retention, data quality, and…
Wendy Ross & Stuart Firestein
The paper describes a story, the pattern of which may be familiar to many scientists. A clear and well thought-out hypothesis which is grounded in the empirical literature – in this case that the better-than-average effect which has been robustly demonstrated across several domains would replicate…
David Grüning
The Better-Than-Average Effect (BTAE, Zell et al., 2020) describes the psychological phenomenon that individuals overestimate their positive characteristics in comparison to others. The BTAE is a special case of a broader phenomenon of self-enhancement effects, which is a robust finding of…
Samantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
This story exemplifies a typical understanding of serendipity, as ‘looking for one thing and finding something else’. The author and his team were looking for a way to mimic nature in their experiment to produce the results they wanted and learned something unexpected and completely new about that…
Jim van Belzen
When appointed as PhD-candidate to work on coastal ecosystems as nature-based coastal protection I started working on the processes that could limit saltmarsh ecosystems from establishing on tidal flats. Saltmarshes seaward of the sea defence attenuate waves and offer flood protection in case of a…
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Ana Borrego Escartín, María Gómez-Cañas, Soledad García Gómez-Heras, Patricia Marín-García, Javier Fernández-Ruiz & Amalia Diez
Malaria is a most important parasitic disease due to its highest impact worldwide. It results in around 200 million clinical cases and 0,5-1 million deaths per year, mainly due to cerebral malaria (CM), a life-threatening neurological syndrome that predominantly affects predominantly children under…
Maja Batorek & Ivana Hromatko
Intermittent fasting is being popularized as a method beneficial not only for weight loss, but also for overall psychological functioning and well-being. However, there is only a handful of studies examining the latter claims. The aim of this open-label study was to contribute to the understanding…
Stephan Schleim
Intermittent fasting has received increasing scientific and public attention in recent years. The study by Batorek et al. investigated whether time-restricted feeding, a form of intermittent fasting, improves cognitive performance and subjective-emotional well-being. This commentary discusses the…
Monika N. Lind, Michelle L. Byrne, Sean Devine & Nicholas B. Allen
Background : This study examined the relationship between (1) participant smiling in daily “selfie” videos and (2) self-reported distress. Given the extensive use of digital devices for sharing expressions of non-verbal behavior, and some speculation that these expressions may reveal psychological…
Sarahanne Field, Noah van Dongen & Leo Tiokhin
The scientific community has entered a challenging era, as originally noted by Wagenmakers (2012) . High-profile instances of fraud, failures to replicate foundational studies in psychology, and admissions of research misconduct (John et al., 2012) cast a shadow over the field of psychology…
Wendy Ross, Samantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
Serendipity refers to the combination of “accident” and “sagacity”; an unexpected and unpredicted event which is noticed by an agent with the right skills to make the most of it. Famous examples include Jocelyn Bell’s discovery of pulsars which was made after she noticed an unusual output from a…
Moin Syed
Knowledge and implementation of open science principles and behaviors remains uneven across the sciences, despite over 10 years of intensive education and advocacy. One reason for the slow and uneven progress of the open science movement is a set of closely held myths about the implications of open…
Sigrid E. M. Heinsbroek, Vincent Bontrop, Rutger P. Chorus & C. Michel Zwaan
The rationale behind a Medical Research Ethics Committee (MREC) negative decision is always shared directly with the applicants. However, insight into the review process and common reasons for a negative decision may also be valuable for other researchers, clinical research organizations and people…
Maximilian Linde, Merle-Marie Pittelkow, Nina R. Schwarzbach & Don van Ravenzwaaij
Practicing open science can have benefits for the career prospects of individual researchers or labs through higher quality work and increased chances of publication. However, being an outspoken advocate of open science might also indirectly benefit individual scientific careers, in the form of…
Tamar Hadar
Clinical Vignette
Ayelet Dassa
Clinical Vignette
Afra Jurkiewicz
Case Study
Monica Subiantoro
Clinical Vignette
Sophie de Ruijter
Opinion
Marije aan het Rot, Merle-Marie Pittelkow, D. Elisabeth Eckardt, Nils Simonsen & Brian D. Ostafin
Background and Objectives: Empathic accuracy, i.e., the degree to which one is able to accurately infer the emotions of others, may be acutely malleable. We examined this idea by testing the immediate effect of a brief mindfulness intervention or facial emotion recognition training. Methods:…
Erkan O. Buzbas & Berna Devezer
A core problem that has been addressed in the scientific reform movement so far is the low rates of reproducibility of research results. Mainstream reform literature has aimed at increasing reproducibility rates by implementing procedural changes in research practice and scientific policy. At the…
Fieke Terstappen, Torsten Plösch, Jorg J.A. Calis, Wessel Ganzevoort, Anouk Pels, Nina D. Paauw, Sanne J. Gordijn, Bas B. van Rijn, Michal Mokry & A. Titia Lely
Objective: Fetal growth restricted (FGR) offspring are more susceptible to develop cardiovascular and renal disease. The potential therapeutic value of sildenafil to improve fetal growth has recently been evaluated in several randomized clinical trials. Here we investigate whether administration of…
Folco Panizza, Piero Ronzani, Carlo Martini, Lucia Savadori & Matteo Motterlini
In this report we outline the null findings of a pre-registered experiment on vaccine hesitancy in the United Kingdom. The experiment targeted vaccine misconceptions common among participants by presenting a correction to such claims endorsed by a group of medical experts. The experiment had the aim…
Arielle Bennett, Daniel Garside, Cassandra Gould van Praag, Thomas J. Hostler, Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Esther Plomp, Antonio Schettino, Samantha Teplitzky & Hao Ye
The Scientific Reform Movement has highlighted the need for large research teams with diverse skills. This has necessitated the growth of professional team infrastructure roles (TIRs) who support research through specialised skills, but do not have primary responsibility for conceiving or leading…
Crystal N. Steltenpohl, Hilary Lustick, Melanie S. Meyer, Lindsay Ellis Lee, Sondra M. Stegenga, Laurel Standiford Reyes & Rachel L. Renbarger
Discussions around transparency in open science focus primarily on sharing data, materials, and coding schemes, especially as these practices relate to reproducibility. This fairly quantitative perspective of transparency does not align with all scientific methodologies. Indeed, qualitative…
Robert T. Thibault, Charlotte R. Pennington & Marcus R. Munafò
Clinical trials are routinely preregistered. In psychology and the social sciences, however, only a small percentage of studies are preregistered, and those preregistrations often contain ambiguities. As advocates strive for broader uptake and effective use of preregistration, they can benefit from…
Thomas J. Hostler
It is acknowledged that conducting open research requires additional time and effort compared to conducting ‘closed’ research. However, this additional work is often discussed only in abstract terms, a discourse which ignores the practicalities of how researchers are expected to find the time to…
Håvard Toft, Alexey Sirotkin, Markus Landrø, Rune Verpe Engeset & Jordy Hendrikx
Outdoor recreation continues to increase in popularity. In Norway, several avalanche fatalities are recorded every year, but the accurate calculation of a fatal accident rate is impossible without knowing how many people are exposed. We attempted to employ signaling data from telecom network data to…
Floor van Meer, Stephen Murphy, Wilhelm Hofmann, Henk van Steenbergen & Lotte F. van Dillen
When individuals eat while distracted, they may compensate by consuming more afterwards. Here, we examined the effect of eating while driving, and explored potential underlying mechanisms. Participants (N = 116, 73.3% female) were randomly allocated to complete a driving simulation (distraction…
Mark Rubin
Metascientists have studied questionable research practices in science. The present article considers the parallel concept of questionable metascience practices (QMPs). A QMP is a research practice, assumption, or perspective that has been questioned by several commentators as being potentially…
David Grüning
Rapid technological development allows for ever new opportunities to nudge individuals’ behavior and knowledge digitally. The Gloria Adherence Subproject by Hartman et al. (2022) implements such a digital nudge via a mobile device aiming at medication adherence. Besides methodological and practical…
Trisha Harjani, Melisa-Sinem Basol, Jon Roozenbeek & Sander van der Linden
Although the spread of misinformation is a pervasive and disruptive global problem, extant research is skewed towards “WEIRD” countries leaving questions about how to tackle misinformation in the developing world with different media and consumption patterns unanswered. We report the results of a…
James Bartlett, Rebecca Jenks & Nigel Wilson
Both daily and non-daily smokers find it difficult to quit smoking long-term. One factor associated with addictive behavior is attentional bias, but previous research in daily and non-daily smokers found inconsistent results and did not report the reliability of their cognitive tasks. Using an…
Joeri van Hugten
This paper introduces the practice of complementary explanation; the practice of taking a published result and writing a focused paper that rigorously and systematically describes the implications for a theory that would be rejected by those results. Such spotlighting of a rejected theory…
Daniel Dunleavy
Best practice standards are one method by which medical providers ensure effective care, thus promoting well-being. Though formal guidelines have been recently implemented to direct and standardize children’s mental healthcare in Florida, little research has evaluated the extent to which they are…
Stefan Gaillard & Sean Devine
It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that failure is systematically ignored in academia. The entire culture of academia revolves around a notion of linear progress made in leaps and bounds by great thinkers, rather than the more realistic image of science as an ongoing process of…
Joshua W. Maxwell, Lin Fang & Joshua M. Carlson
Threatening stimuli are often thought to have sufficient potency to bias attention, relative to neutral stimuli. Researchers and clinicians opt for frequently used paradigms to measure such bias, such as the dot-probe task. Bias to threat in the dot-probe task is indicated by a congruency effect…
Daria Schwalbe
Discourses surrounding migration and integration often see language, and in particular the knowledge of the native language, as a crucial barrier to minorities’ access to healthcare and welfare benefits, equal healthcare treatment, social integration, and psychological wellbeing. Using methods of…
Tamal Kumar De, Victoria J. Madden, Johan W. S. Vlaeyen & Patrick Onghena
Single-case experiments are increasingly popular in the behavioral sciences. Due to their flexibility, single-case designs can be customized to test a variety of experimental hypotheses. We were interested in using a single-case experimental approach to test whether pain thresholds can be influenced…
Elia Valentini
Chronic pain (CP) is estimated to affect at least one-third of the population in the United Kingdom. Fibromyalgia (FM) is one of the most disabling CP conditions. Epidemiological research suggests its global prevalence to be between 2-8%. The unknown pathogenesis, lack of biological markers to…
Vlad P. Glăveanu & Alex Gillespie
A “failed” experiment (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2021 ) tried to reveal the role played by materiality in solving an insight problem that made reference to embodied action, leading to valuable insights about the nature of cognition and the experimental method. In this commentary, we argue that this…
Georgios Ampatzidis
Linda Hartman, Marc R. Kok, Esmeralda Molenaar, Ed N. Griep, Jaap M. Van Laar, Jan Maarten Van Woerkom, Cornelia F. Allaart, Hennie G. Raterman, Yvonne P. M. Ruiterman, Marieke J. H. Voshaar, João Redol, Rui M. A. Pinto, L. Thomas Klausch, Willem F. Lems & Maarten Boers
Medication adherence, which is the extent to which patients take their medication as prescribed, is essential in treating chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Therefore, we nested a subproject in the two-year multicenter Glucocorticoid Low-dose Outcome in Rheumatoid…
Caroline Fischer
Based on data triangulation, open-ended questions can be used to overcome a typical problem with data collection using surveys: Human behavior can only be captured as stated or intended, but not as real behavior. In this study on knowledge sharing in the workplace, a quantitative measure of…
Wendy Ross & Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau
Insight problems are sometimes designed to encourage an incorrect and misleading interpretation that veils a simple answer. The socks problem is one such problem: Given black socks and brown socks in a drawer mixed in a ratio of four to five, how many socks will you have to take out to make sure…
Hubertus Nederbragt
An important topic in biomedical science is the repair of damaged organs by in vitro cultured differentiated stem cells. This article evaluates an article in this field, entitled "The complexity of joint regeneration", by Diloksumpan et al. (2021) , who described a regeneration experiment of…
Paweena Diloksumpan, Florencia Abinzano, Mylène de Ruijter, Anneloes Mensinga, Saskia Plomp, Ilyas Khan, Harold Brommer, Ineke Smit, Miguel Dias Castilho, P. René van Weeren, Jos Malda & Riccardo Levato
Articular cartilage damage is a major challenge in healthcare due to the lack of long-term repair options. There are several promising regenerative implant-based approaches for the treatment, but the fixation of the implant remains a significant challenge. This study evaluated the potential for…
Kristel De Groot & Ilona Domen
Pain can be considered as a signal of “bodily error”: Errors – discrepancies between actual and optimal/targeted state – can put organisms at danger and activate behavioral defensive systems. If the error relates to the body, pain is the warning signal that motivates protective action such as…
Michael Young & Sihua Xu
Studies in the field of psychology often employ (computerised) behavioural tasks, aimed at mimicking real-world situations that elicit certain actions in participants. Such tasks are for example used to study risk propensity, a trait-like tendency towards taking or avoiding risk. One of the most…
Stefan Gaillard & Sean Devine
This paper is about error on three levels. First of all, it deals with research into the ERN, error-related negativity. The ERN is a negative deflection in the EEG signal, which tends to occur within 100 milliseconds of making an error. The authors hypothesize that physical pain can be considered as…
Alexa Ruel & Jeremy Ullman
Alcohol and its effects on aggression has been the subject of many discussions and research papers. Despite this fact, there is still a debate surrounding what it is exactly about alcohol that causes aggression. The current study sought to replicate the past finding by Bartholow and Heinz (2006)…
Sean Devine & Stefan Gaillard
The paper ‘Alcohol cues and aggressive thoughts’ reports a failed attempt at reproducing two experiments. The massive shortcomings of the reported reproduction are obvious. For a moment I was tempted to think that the authors, in the form of a standard psychological paper, were presenting a…
Alexa Ruel & Jeremy Ullman
Alcohol and its effects on aggression have been the subject of many discussions and research papers. Despite this fact, there is still a debate surrounding what it is exactly about alcohol that causes aggression. The current study sought to replicate the past finding by Bartholow and Heinz (2006)…
Rebecca C. Sindall & Dani J. Barrington
Failure is an integral part of learning: The adage “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again” was originally coined to encourage children to persevere with their school work (Palmer, 1840) . In the same way that we expect people to fail during the learning process as they gain new skills,…
Sean Devine, Max Bautista Perpinyà, Valentine Delrue, Stefan Gaillard, Thomas F. K. Jorna, Martijn van der Meer, Lottricia Millett, Chelsea Pozzebon & Jobke Visser
With the publication of our first issue, we are pleased to formally introduce the Journal of Trial and Error (JOTE). Our goal in this editorial article is to (i) outline the problem JOTE aims to solve, (ii) detail our solution, and (iii) state our goals as a journal. As readers will see, we…
Juliane Traxler, Roxane V. Philips, Andreas von Leupoldt & Johan W. S. Vlaeyen
Pain can be considered as a signal of “bodily error”: Errors — discrepancies between the actual and optimal/targeted state — can put organisms in danger and activate behavioral defensive systems. If the error relates to the body, pain is the warning signal that motivates protective action such as…
Veronika Cheplygina
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - Veni scheme application 2018
Maarten Derksen
“Trial and Error (-related negativity)” is a fascinating paper detailing the attempt to develop a new experimental paradigm to study the role of error-related negativity in the development of avoidance behavior. In my comments on this paper I will focus on the interaction between experimenters and…
René H. F. P. Bekkers
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - Vici scheme application 2019
Kristel De Groot
During the copy-editing phase, a rounding error occurred in the conversion of Table 1, leading to the numbers in Column F and G being incorrectly cut off to two decimals rather than displaying the full five. Due to this conversion error, the transition from positive to negative expectation values…
Nicole Nelson
This short essay argues for an expanded conception of publication bias. In addition to considering the selective publication of results, I argue that we need to also consider the selective publication of epistemic by-products—observations and knowledge that scientists accumulate incidentally in the…
Kristel De Groot
Studies in the field of psychology often employ (computerized) behavioral tasks, aimed at mimicking real-world situations that elicit certain actions in participants. Such tasks are for example used to study risk propensity, a trait-like tendency towards taking or avoiding risk. One of the most…
Ruud Abma
A Comment on "Alcohol Cues and their Effects on Sexually Aggressive Thoughts"
Julie Leboeuf, Stine Linden-Andersen & Jonathan Carriere
Alcohol and its effects on aggression have been the subject of many discussions and research papers. Despite this fact, there is still a debate surrounding what it is exactly about alcohol that causes aggression. The current study sought to replicate the past finding by Bartholow and Heinz (2006),…
