Science

Zach and Jack* write: What sort of papers best serve their readers? We can enumerate desirable characteristics: these papers should (i) provide intuition to aid the reader’s understanding, but clearly distinguish it from stronger conclusions supported by evidence; (ii) describe empirical investigations that consider and rule out alternative hypotheses

Public versions of working papers are increasingly the norm. So are citations to them. But there are four concerns with citing working papers: 1. Peer review: Peer review improves the quality of papers, but often enough it doesn’t catch serious, basic issues. Thus, a lack of peer review is

The Internet gives many things. But none that are permanent. That is about to change. Librarians got together and recently launched https://perma.cc/ which provides a permanent link to stuff. Why is link rot important? Here’s an excerpt from a paper by Gertler and Bullock: “more than one-fourth

Developers of Python packages sometimes envy R developers for the simple perks they enjoy. For example, a reliable web service that gives a reasonable indication of the total number of times an R package has been downloaded (albeit only from one of the mirrors). To achieve the same, Python developers

To err is human. Good scientists are aware of that, painfully so. The model scientist obsessively checks everything twice over and still keeps eyes peeled for loose ends. So it is a shock to learn that some of us are culpable for spreading misinformation. Ken and I find that articles

One fundamental principle of science is that there is no privileged observer. You get to question what people did. But to question, you first must know what people did. So part of good scientific practice is to make it easy for people to understand how the sausage was made—how

In 2010, Google estimated that approximately 130M books had been published. As a species, we still know very little about the world. But what we know already far exceeds what any of us can learn in a lifetime. Scientists are acutely aware of the point. They must specialize, as chances