Books like The Design of Experiments in Neuroscience

Ritchie was part of a team that attempted to replicate a famous study led by a prominent psychologist, Daryl Bem, claiming that people did better on a word memorization test if they studied the words after taking the test.

Ritchie and his co-authors attempted to replicate this study and found no evidence supporting Bem’s claim. This is but one example of a scientific crisis in that attempts to replicate influential studies published in top peer-reviewed journals fail nearly half the time. Ritchie explains and illustrates the reasons for the current replication crisis in science.

You may have heard of ‘significance testing,’ and the magical ‘p < .05,’ which somehow makes a research result ‘significant,’ which is often taken as (almost) ‘true.’ Even if you haven’t heard of all that, Kline explains clearly why significance testing has been disastrous for science, leading to misleading conclusions and much valuable research not even being reported.

He draws on my work to explain how ‘the new statistics’ (estimation) is a much better way to understand results. The first chapter is fairly easy to read. Later chapters are also terrific but get more technical as Kline explains lots of ways to do things better. As I’m quoted on the back cover, “Read this book and see the future!” Happily, the future is increasingly looking as Kline recommended.

Yes, this is a textbook, but if you are seeking a research design and methods text for psychology or a related discipline, this is easily my top choice.

There are lots of references to topical stories to keep everything relevant for students. There’s a truckload of valuable stuff online to support both teachers and learners. This fourth edition is right up-to-the-moment, Chapter 3 especially so, as it explains three types of scientific claims, and four types of validity that researchers should aim to achieve. That may sound forbidding, but Morling’s examples and explanations are pleasingly accessible.  

Charlotte Pennington eagerly started her PhD but became anxious and depressed when her experiments "didn’t work’" and were refused publication. She read about the replication crisis — many published studies won’t replicate—and Open Science. Soon, it was her passion to teach about Open Science and what’s needed to achieve efficient research and trustworthy research literature.

The result is A Student’s Guide to Open Science. It’s short, clear, and highly readable. She’s well-informed and covers the story in engaging detail. There are practical guides to using Open Science practices and numerous links to follow as you wish. Statistical issues are mentioned but are not her focus.

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers explains complex ideas clearly, and is passionate about the need for reform.

I studied at Tel Aviv University, where the name Gideon Toury was uttered in reverent tones. I never met Toury in person, and it was only towards my graduation that I finally got around to reading this iconic book.

To say that it is a smooth or engaging read would be a gross misrepresentation. Toury was a devout structuralist and a firm believer in the importance of scientific inquiry in the humanities. Accordingly, this is a book one reads in a staggered mode, one dense section at a time. This makes for an unusual reading experience, but there is something addictive about it, especially for contemporary readers.

We have grown so distant from this kind of extreme positivism, this undaunting belief in the possibility of unbiased scholarship, that for a brief moment, the numerous charts, formulas, and abbreviations that adorn the pages of Toury’s book seem almost amusing. But this… show more.

As the attack on democracy in the West has come to include the grip of Big Pharma on public health programmes and on bodies like the World Health Organization, the covert dimensions of how this influence is being exercised have also come under scrutiny.

With a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlighting the fate of successive critics of medical misconduct, one of the most vocal of these critics and her co-author offer a shocking account of the repression they faced.

Passionate, personal, and highly revealing about the risks one takes by speaking out on the basis of facts.

I’m always talking to scientists, but I have never undertaken anything like Bruno Latour’s voyage of ethnographic discovery. He decided to figure out how science works by embedding himself in a scientific lab for two years and, discarding all preconceptions, recording what he saw there as though he were an anthropologist visiting a foreign culture.

It turns out to be an intensely political culture: rather than following prescribed laws of method and logic, scientists are making judgment calls and negotiating with one another to decide the significance of their data, making it up as they go along. Latour brings out the subjectivity of much low-level scientific decision-making, in contrast to Kuhn’s picture, in which the blueprint for thinking—the paradigm—rules over the enterprise like a catechism.

Ahrens opened up my eyes to a method of building on, diving into, and creating notes without them getting lost. I love feeling productive whether I agree or disagree with something. I now have a way to connect my ideas together and gather them when creating articles, books, and courses. It didn't use to be fun to take notes, but now it is since I know I can get back to and update things for however long I like without ever feeling obligated to them.

How can the humanities offer a space for moral reflection if they are heirs of a tradition that has often been discriminatory, oppressive, and blatantly Eurocentric? Archaeology of Babel offers a much-needed corrective to books like Celenza’s by drawing attention to colonial abuses of philological scholarship (with grammars, dictionaries, and translations serving as instruments of colonial rule). The book’s subtitle is, of course, exaggerated: the humanities are better conceived of as a multi-layered heritage than as an edifice built on a single foundation. But the exaggeration serves a purpose: Ahmed invites us to “see ourselves as inheritors of a colonial legacy.” Apparently, the humanist tradition to which we are heirs is a mixed bag. Continuing it requires careful stock-taking: what do we want to take with us into the future?