Books like The Design of Experiments in Neuroscience — picked by fans

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.

This book, by Nate Silver of 538 fame, explains in a straightforward manner why so many predictions by “experts,” from weather forecasts to sports outcomes to election polling to economics, ultimately prove wrong.

It relates to understanding the “signal,” the underlying science that is often revealed through trends and patterns in data, relative to the “noise,” the random or unpredictable variations always present in data. Silver also explains the concept of conditional probability, probability when provided with some relevant information, in an unusually clear manner.

The book reads more like a casual conversation with the author, rather than a statistics textbook.

The proverbial scientist at work conjures the image of a solitary investigator bent over a workbench cluttered with arcane instruments nestled among reams of scribbled notes just waiting to be transformed into creative answers to pressing questions about the natural world. The image's simplicity belies the complexity of the process it purports to represent. Adding descriptions of the what, how, and why of scientific inquiry, observation, and analysis still misses a crucial element that makes the improvement, dissemination, and acceptance of new knowledge possible, namely the active behind-the-scenes collaboration between scientists and the illustrators, photographers, printers, and other artisans who use visual representation to shape and successfully communicate that knowledge. 

Mapping the Spectrum is not just an exhaustive and illuminating history of spectrum analysis. In it, author Klaus Hentschel brilliantly exposes the essential role of visual culture in bringing this all-important tool of modern science to useful life. He has… show more.

This book written in 1922 by the Austrian economist at the University of Vienna is one of the few truly foundational works in political economy. Mises takes apart the theory of the Marxist moneyless planned economy which Lenin and then Stalin tried to apply to the Soviet Union. Mises lucidly explains why not only that it could never work but would lead to catastrophic and unending shortages, dictatorship, repression, and arbitrary rule enforced by a militarized one-party state. Although Mises had no knowledge of China, it is the best book to read in order to understand what happened in China in the 20th century.

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?