“Scientists Rarely Admit Mistakes. A New Project Wants to Change That”
“there really is no effective way for scientists to quickly and publicly inform colleagues that they are no longer confident in their published work. Public declarations like Carney’s are one way to go, but they are often difficult to track. So an ambitious new effort, motivated by Carney’s move, is encouraging psychologists to own up to shortcomings in their published work via a website in the form of official loss-of-confidence statements — published at a single online clearinghouse for such confessions called the Loss of Confidence Project…
Rohrer and her colleagues, Tal Yarkoni of the University of Texas at Austin and Christopher Chabris, at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, are currently accepting submissions of loss-of-confidence statements, focusing on psychology studies — and with some ground rules: Authors submitting a loss-of-confidence statement, for example, are expected take primary responsibility for methodological or theoretical problems with their paper — otherwise, the entry goes into whistleblowing territory and is not eligible for publication. The researchers eventually plan to publish the statements in an academic paper, Rohrer said.”
