Leif Nelson
speaker
57 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Leif Nelson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was doing.
So I think journals have really complicated incentives.
Of course, they want to publish good work to begin with, so there's some incentive to do some quality check and kind of cover their ass there. But once they've published something, there's a strong incentive for them to defend it or at least to not publicize any errors.
So one of the things the editor-in-chief does is when a manuscript is submitted, I would read it and decide whether it should continue through the peer review process or I could reject it there. And that's called desk rejection.
One thing I started doing at the journal that wasn't official policy, it was just a practice I decided to adopt, was that when a manuscript was submitted, I would hide the author's names from myself. So I was rejecting things without looking at who the authors were. So the publication committee started a conversation with me, which is totally reasonable, about the overall desk rejection rate.
Am I rejecting too many things, etc.? There was some conversation about whether I was desk rejecting the wrong people. So if I was stepping on important people's toes and an email was forwarded to me from a quote unquote award winning social psychologist, you know, Samin desk rejected my paper. I found this extremely distasteful and I won't be submitting there again.
And when I would try to engage about the substance of my decisions, you know, the scientific basis for them, that wasn't what the conversation was about.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was doing.
We're expanding a team that used to have a different name. We're going to call them the Statistics, Transparency and Rigor editors, the star editors. And so that team will be supplementing the handling editors, the editors who actually organize the peer review and make the decisions on submissions.
Like if a handling editor has a question about the data integrity or about details of the methods or things like that, the star editor team will provide their expertise and help fill in those gaps. We're also, I'm not sure exactly what form this will take, but try to incentivize more accurate and calibrated claims and less hype and exaggeration.
This is something that I think is particularly challenging with short articles like psychological science publishes and especially, you know, a journal that has really high rejection rate where the vast majority of submissions are rejected. authors are competing for those few spots. And so it feels like they have to make a really bold claim.
And so it's going to be very difficult to play this like back and forth where authors are responding to the perception of what the incentives are. So we need to convey to them that actually, if you go too far, make too bold of claims that aren't warranted, you will be more likely to get rejected.
But I'm not sure if authors will believe that just because we say that they're still competing for a very selective number of spots.
Oh, I don't mind being wrong. I think journalists should publish things that turn out to be wrong. It would be a bad thing to approach journal editing by saying we're only going to publish true things or things that we're 100% sure are true. The important thing is that the things that are more likely to be wrong are presented in a more uncertain way. And sometimes we'll make mistakes even there.
Sometimes we'll present things with certainty that we shouldn't have presented. What I would like to be involved in and what I plan to do is to encourage more post-publication critique and correction, reward the whistleblowers who identify errors that are valid and that need to be acted upon, and create more incentives for people to do that and do that well.
I don't know. Do you have any ideas? No.
Stephen, I'm the person that walks into these academic conferences and everyone is like, here comes Debbie Downer.
Bad question? No. Like, it reminds me of how stressful it all is. We struggle a little bit with thinking about analogies for what we do. We're definitely not police. Police, amongst other things, have institutional power. They have badges, whatever. We don't have any of that. We're not enforcers in any way. The internal affairs thing...
Showing 1–20 of 57 · page 1 of 3
Next →