I read Andrew Gelman's post the other day and was wondering what to excerpt. Alex Tabarrok figured it out for me:
This Andrew Gelman post on the replication crisis and the role that blogs have played in generating that crisis starts off slow but just builds and builds until by the end it’s like holy rolling thunder. Here is just one bit:
Fiske is annoyed with social media, and I can understand that. She’s sitting at the top of traditional media. She can publish an article in the APS Observer and get all this discussion without having to go through peer review; she has the power to approve articles for the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; work by herself and har colleagues is featured in national newspapers, TV, radio, and even Ted talks, or so I’ve heard. Top-down media are Susan Fiske’s friend. Social media, though, she has no control over. That’s must be frustrating, and as a successful practioner of traditional media myself (yes, I too have published in scholarly journals), I too can get annoyed when newcomers circumvent the traditional channels of publication. People such as Fiske and myself spend our professional lives building up a small fortune of coin in the form of publications and citations, and it’s painful to see that devalued, or to think that there’s another sort of scrip in circulation that can buy things that our old-school money cannot.
But let’s forget about careers for a moment and instead talk science.
When it comes to pointing out errors in published work, social media have been necessary. There just has been no reasonable alternative. Yes, it’s sometimes possible to publish peer-reviewed letters in journals criticizing published work, but it can be a huge amount of effort. Journals and authors often apply massive resistance to bury criticisms.
If you are interested in the replication crisis or the practice of science read the whole thing.
I read Gelman's post with interest given my social media criticism of Desvousges, Mathews and Train (2015) was happening at the same time. I posted my comment on their paper in three parts last week. The main comment looks at the data and there are two appendices that are replies to their further comment on our 2013 paper. I might have another appendix or three to go. (9/26 update: two more parts are been posted)
The benefits of posting a comment on a blog or elsewhere is that it is immediate and bypasses the where the editor wonders if the problems with the paper rise to the level of publishing the comment (i.e., where the editor must admit that the journal's peer review isn't perfect). A lot of comments don't get written because of the publication lag and the risk of rejection. There are a lot of papers in the literature with small and large problems that were missed by peer review. Blogs and other social media (to a lesser extent twitter) can and should be used to point these problems out.
