15 articles
All articlesRrita 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…
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…
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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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…
