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Adrian Barnett

@aidybarnett.bsky.social

700 followers 540 following 110 posts

Statistician working in meta-research. Deltiologist.

Adrian Gerard Barnett is a professor in the faculty of Health in the school of Public Health and Social Work, at Queensland University of Technology and was president of the Statistical Society of Australia from 2018 to 2020. .. more

Environmental science 27%

Public Health 23%

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

The Conversation UK @uk.theconversation.com · 2h

Lotteries may be fair in theory, but new research shows people prefer expert committees to decide who gets scarce medical treatment.

Should we decide by lottery who gets a medical treatment first?

Lotteries may be fair in theory, but new research shows people prefer expert committees to decide who gets scarce medical treatment.

tcnv.link

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Alan McElligott @amcell.bsky.social · 3h

2025. (not just cancer lit....) Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? A large language model scans abstracts and titles for signs that an article was produced by a 'paper-mill' company. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them?

A large language model scans abstracts and titles for signs that an article was produced by a 'paper-mill' company.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett

JAMES HEATHERS @jamesheathers.bsky.social · 17h

Free data resources in science are having the shit mined out of them to produce X,000's of bullshit papers.

What should we do?

(Warning: I sat on this draft for too long, and publishers are already doing some of it. That's what I get for engaging with the news.)

open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

How To Stop The Next 10,000 Bullshit Papers

Some remarkably un-radical proposals

open.substack.com

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 9d

It's a needlepoint.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 9d

I think the authors would have been better off taking a walk than creating this diagram.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 9d

R beats Python because R has dedicated quilts, for example: www.reddit.com/r/rstats/com.... Once you've lost the quilting war, you've lost everything.

From the rstats community on Reddit: My mother liked my laptop stickers and did this "tidy" phone/hdd patchwork bag 😍

Explore this post and more from the rstats community

www.reddit.com

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 9d

At last, a simple diagram that explains random forests. Go forth and make random diagrams, I mean random forests. From www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejo...

Stick figure surrounded by tree-like structures with speech bubbles about sepsis.

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 19d

It's 2025.723 and scientists are still putting too many decimal places in their results.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Sep 3

When the zombie apocalypse starts in Weipa

Map of Queensland showing clear disease outbreak in the north

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Sep 2

When the zombie apocalypse starts in Brisbane

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Dalmeet Singh Chawla @dalmeet.bsky.social · Aug 26

Peer reviewers are more likely to recommend accepting papers that cite their work — my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social:

cen.acs.org/policy/publi...

@aidybarnett.bsky.social

Peer reviewers like papers that cite them

New report finds that referees are more likely to recommend studies that refer to their own work

cen.acs.org

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Private Eye Magazine @privateeyenews.bsky.social · Aug 26

“I still yearn for the good old days…”

From the latest Private Eye, out now.

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 22

A lot of government contracts in Australia have suppression clauses as a standard - that should definitely end. Media attention like this helps. And then perhaps some better training of bureaucrats to show that the truth is always the best long term solution, that's probably naive of me.

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Rachel Fieldhouse @rfieldmouse.bsky.social · Aug 22

Reviewers are more likely to approve manuscripts if authors agree to cite their work than those who don't get cited.
Thanks to @aidybarnett.bsky.social, @balazsaczel.bsky.social and @econfeld.bsky.social for chatting with me for this story!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Peer reviewers more likely to approve articles that cite their own work

Preprint examines how citations can influence the review process.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett, Matt N Williams

AIMOS @aimosinc.bsky.social · Aug 19

Submissions for #AIMOS2025 in Sydney close in just under two weeks!
aimos-inc.github.io/aimos.confer...

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 18

Sadly familiar story on the ABC over government interference in scientific results www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08.... I fully support the statistician (Adrian Baddeley) for quitting.

Emails raise new questions about state government's role in scientific report

In May, the WA government released a report from an ongoing study into the impacts of industrial air emissions on ancient rock carvings, but new emails obtained by FOI have raised questions about the ...

www.abc.net.au

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 18

@tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy has it. It's growing all the time.

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 13

Interesting stuff, but I don't see anything on peer review in that PDF.

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Marc Lynch, Ben H. Ansell , and 28 more Joanna Bryson, Marc Lynch, Ben H. Ansell, Adrian Barnett, Richard McElreath, Linda J. Skitka, Zhang, Ingrid Piller, Melissa Terras, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Martin Paul Eve, Justin H. Kirkland, Finland, Martin Tomko, Jason Jones, Ingo Rohlfing, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Andrew Leyshon, Samuel Bentolila, Samuel Workman, Gordon B. Schmidt, Bruce Bradbury, Michiel van Meeteren, Zen Faulkes, Simon Usherwood, Emmanuel Mourlon‐Druol, Urška Demšar, Hayley Bennett, Eugene McCann, Annalee Newitz, Susan D. Blum

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @hannahshelley.bsky.social · Aug 13

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Google Scholar Is Doomed

Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

hannahshelley.neocities.org

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 12

Fair points. But for the uncited reviewer to be right and withhold their approval it must have been for a serious issue. Wouldn't we hope that the other reviewer (on average) would also have spotted the serious issue and withhold their approval too?

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 11

But by matching on paper the quality issues should become sidelined. We have two or more reviewers looking at identical papers, some good, some bad. If there are consistent patterns in behaviour depending on whether a reviewer is cited, then that's likely independent of the article quality.

Reposted by Adrian Barnett, Andy Baker

Elisabeth Bik - Perpetrator 5, a fraudulent microbiologist @elisabethbik.bsky.social · Aug 10

Retraction by ‪@mdpiopenaccess.bsky.social‬ of a paper in which a University of West Florida professor appears to have photoshopped his model airplane into a photo of a NASA wind tunnel
mdpi.com/2226-4310/7/...
pubpeer.com/publications...

Figure 6 from the paper, showing a model airplane that appears to have been photoshopped into a wind tunnel. The photo of the plane is taken from above, but the wind tunnel is photographed from below.

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 8

If there's anyone listening from the Global Burden of Disease, your data is being used for trash studies and your reputation is heading down the toilet.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 6

Thanks for sharing. Your proposed solutions made me think of another compromise: Reviewers self-citations are in the paper for people to read, but don't get used in the indexing data. So the reviewer can contribute to scholarly debate, but can't boost their h-indices.

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Reposted by Marco Festa‐Bianchet

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 6

A new preprint showing strong evidence of peer reviewers engaging in transactional peer review as some only approved a manuscript after requesting and then getting cited osf.io/preprints/os...

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett

AusRN @ausrepro.bsky.social · Aug 6

Care about #reproducibility in research & publishing? Join this webinar on Aug 27th, jointly organised by @aimosinc.bsky.social & @ausrepro.bsky.social on statistical reproducibility with @michelenuijten.bsky.social & @tomhardwicke.bsky.social Free - register here qut.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 6

The NHMRC has today released a Good Institutional Practice Guide. I'm biased, because I was involved in its development, but I think it's a great document that the Australian research community really needs. www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/pub...

www.nhmrc.gov.au

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Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Brian A. Nosek, Adrian Barnett , and 10 more Dorothy Bishop, Brian A. Nosek, Adrian Barnett, Sam Harper, James M. Bullock, Julie L. Lockwood, Alistair Munro, Magnus Johansson, Ian Hussey, Silvia Secchi, Juanjo Medina, Jack Stilgoe, David Spurrett

Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · Aug 4

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise

Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

reeserichardson.blog

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Aug 1

As a statistician, I am getting very "First they came" vibes here, but this is just rot and bonkers. I remember campaigning for Andreas Georgiou when the Greek government pulled a similar trick. I know the international stats community will rally together again, but will anything change?

Cam Walker @camwalker.bsky.social · Aug 1

Real North Korea vibes: If I don't like what you're saying then you're gone.

Trump sacks USA's top statistician after official data showed a sharp slowdown in the US jobs market.

www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Trump sacks US data chief after terrible jobs numbers

Donald Trump has sacked America’s top statistician after official data showed a sharp slowdown in the US jobs market.

www.telegraph.co.uk

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Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Cam Walker @camwalker.bsky.social · Aug 1

Trump sacks US data chief after terrible jobs numbers

Donald Trump has sacked America’s top statistician after official data showed a sharp slowdown in the US jobs market.

www.telegraph.co.uk

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