Ingo Rohlfing

@ingorohlfing.bsky.social

4.4K followers 1.3K following 1.2K posts

I am here for all interesting and funny posts on the social sciences, broadly understood and including open science and meta science, academia, teaching and research. https://linktr.ee/ingorohlfing

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Political science 30%

Sociology 17%

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Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 4h

What's the occasion this time?

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 1d

It is very short and not research, so one can hardly fool anyone, but I agree its misrepresentation should be avoided. Maybe the publisher messed it up, things can go wrong at many stages of the process.

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 3d

I see, I believed it was only about fake citations. This is then indeed much harder.

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 3d

It seems necessary now to validate citations. I assume there exists a tool for this or, if not, that one will be developed soon. One would not even need an "AI-powered" tool for this, just a tool for verified publication records, like OpenAlex maybe?

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

Andrew Gelman et al. @statmodeling.bsky.social · 3d

“I think there’s an argument to be made that much meta-scientific work is a kind of mirror image of the empirical work it critiques”
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/21/i...

“I think there’s an argument to be made that much meta-scientific work is a kind of mirror image of the empirical work it critiques” | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Reposted by Iain Davidson, Charles West, Lesley A. Hall , and 11 more Iain Davidson, Charles West, Lesley A. Hall, Juan Cole, Kris Inwood, Ingo Rohlfing, Robert C. Richards, Adrian Vickers, Christine Kooi, Martin Drenthen, Katrina Navickas, Kathleen Kennedy, Klaus Oschema, Aviel Roshwald

Arya Zandvakili @aryazandvakili.bsky.social · 3d

When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

Perhaps Google Scholar is irrelevant enough to Google to be worth shutting down.

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

Of course, the overall problem is that citations and citation indices are taken to be important in the article and by many researchers. If we wouldn't care about citations, it would not matter that GS is screwing up metrics. 4/

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

Some researchers may have noticed their inflated citation counts and decided not to correct them. If so, this would be shortsighted because a cursory look at the cited publications most likely shows that something is off, devaluing the whole citation record of this person. 3/

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

With regard to Google Scholar, it reads like a "yes, but" argument. Google's careless assignment of publications to names is the root error. I guess Google could do much better, but, as the article states, Google does not care about at all about improving GS. 2/

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

Google Scholar’s citation errors skew h-index leaderboards
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/google-...
"Thousands of mistakenly awarded citations left uncorrected highlight the perils of leaving profile curation to academics, say critics"
I don't quite agree with the focus taken in this article 1/

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing, Paul Nightingale, Jan R. Boehnke

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 7d

The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.

Richard McElreath: It must not be overlooked that junior researchers DO NOT TRUST US. We, the directors, are a big part of the problem. We made this system, we remake it every year, and we benefit from it. What can we do to credibly signal our commitment to reform a corrupt research culture? My conversations with junior scientists in the society has taught me that directors are too often either indifferent or hostile to science reform. We cannot hope to convince our prize winning colleagues. Their egos are immune. But we can replace retirements with researchers who care more about integrity than their own prestige. This is important both for earning the trust of the junior researchers who really do the research in the MPG and for attracting excellent future directors and starting to earn the trust of the public. So I suggest two strong signals to our junior researchers (and the public): (1) we will reform recruitment and promotion at all levels to eliminate proxies like citation counts and journal brands in favor of reliability and sustainability; (2) we will make open science skills a core part of scientific training, through the graduate schools at a minimum, as conditions for the central funding. The most ambitious thing we could do, as hinted at in item 5 above, is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research. As the largest basic research organization in the world, the MPG is uniquely suited to studying research and its products from a broad perspective that includes the humanities, the sciences, and policy. Governments are already involved in science reform. Someone should study it in an organized and sustained way.

Reposted by Cas Mudde, Mark J. Brandt, Robert Huber , and 8 more Cas Mudde, Mark J. Brandt, Robert Huber, Jason Reifler, Ingo Rohlfing, Christian Breunig, Thomas M. Meyer, Alessandro Nai, Federica Genovese, Claudia Landwehr, Roman Senninger

Julian Garritzmann @garritzmannj.bsky.social · 7d

we have 5 positions open at @goetheuni.bsky.social in Frankfurt
- a 4,5 year postdoc in my @erc.europa.eu project on the educational cleavage
- 2 postdoc & 2 PhD positions, 4 years, in a research group on Reconfiguration & Internalization of Social Structure

www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794784/FB0...

Goethe-Universität — FB03 - Gesellschaftswissenschaften

Die Goethe-Universität ist eine forschungsstarke Hochschule in der europäischen Finanzmetropole Frankfurt. Lebendig, urban und weltoffen besitzt sie als Stiftungsuniversität ein einzigartiges Maß an E...

www.uni-frankfurt.de

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

Because they anticipate there is demand for this and make money from it?

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

They say it is their proprietary model. Besides my general unease in using synthetic panels, has an independent third party scrutinized their model? How has it been validated?

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

but not others. For US political science, the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations summarize quite well the perspectives and tensions in the qualitative research community across issues and methods qualtd.net 3/

Qualitative Transparency Deliberations - Index page

qualtd.net

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

There is qualitative research based on epistemological positions that renders ideas such as replication inapplicable, which should be acknowledged (it's a discussion that raged for years in US political science in the 2010s). And then there is a gray area for which some criteria my be applicable 2/

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 7d

OSF | Qualitative Methods, and the Dangers of Positivism Creep
osf.io/preprints/so...
I think it is a valid concern that certain kinds of research amenable to #OpenScience practices crowd out alternative forms; the Gold Standard directive works in this direction www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... 1/

Reposted by Robert Böhm, Brady T. West, Brendan Nyhan , and 43 more Robert Böhm, Brady T. West, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Hodson, Carl T. Bergstrom, Richard Price, Steven Van de Walle, Mary Feeney, Jamie Morgan, Ian Hall, Fabián Muniesa, Jason Reifler, Kelly Smith, Ingo Rohlfing, Ian Hussey, James Grimmelmann, Smith, Rebecca Tushnet, David R. Miller, Patrick S. Forscher, Michelle L. Mazurek, Margot C. Finn, Michael D. McDonald, Sebastian Karcher, Martin Kreidl, Maria Abreu, Eric Hehman, Zen Faulkes, Joanna Tai, Madeleine Pownall, Damian Trilling, David Murakami Wood, Sofia Stathi, Johannes Breuer, Woodrow Hartzog, Greg Linden, Jack Stilgoe, Richard M. Carpiano, Aleksandra Urman, Juan Ramón, Gemma C. Sharp, Terry Gaasterland, Maksym Polyakov, Jake Anders, Jeannette Sutton, Béatrice Cointe

Sabrina Norwood @sabrinanorwood.bsky.social · 8d

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Text reads: About synthetic panels
Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels.

Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey.

Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads:
Discussion
The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002)
of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 8d

nicht dazu bereit sind, ihren Teil zur Überwindung beizutragen. Ich sehe es aber auch so, dass es immer schwieriger wird, die Probleme nicht zu sehen und die Welle weiterhin reiten zu wollen. 2//

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 8d

Danke. Kooperieren bedeutet hier, mehr auf Relevanz und Inhalte und nicht mehr auf Frequenz der Publikationen zu gehen? Mein persönlicher, sehr begrenzter Eindruck ist, dass es noch einige gibt, die kein Problem kollektiven Handelns erkennen, und dass von denen, die es erkennen, einige 1/

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

Klaus Pforr @klauspforr.bsky.social · 8d

mehrere papieren gesehen habe, wäre schon damit geholfen, dass man einfach mal damit aufhört, die notwendigen publikationszahlen weiter zu erhöhen. ausserdem muss die betrachtung weg von "ich hab wieder was publiziert" hin zu "ich hab das und das rausgefunden". in meinem umfeld wird forschung als

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 8d

Bei der doppelten Verneinung und dem first-mover bin ich gedanklich raus. Worauf bezieht das first mover hier? 2/

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 8d

Ich stimme bei allem zu. Ich habe ein wenig Zweifel, wie gut die Kriterien der Drittmitteleinrichtungen helfen, weil eine Gutachter:in immer noch nach Prestige der Zeitschrift bewerten kann oder weiß, wie "produktiv" die antragstellende Person ist. Es ist trotzdem eine richtige Maßnahme. 1/

Holiday Ryan @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 11d

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

APSA @apsa.bsky.social · 12d

Deadline Sunday! Submit applications for the 2026 Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) to support early-career scholars in Arab #MENA countries.

APSA and IQMR will support up to three MENA scholars to attend at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Apply here:

Call for Applications: 2026 Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) | Deadline: December 14, 2025 -

Call for Applications: Apply Now for the 2026 Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR) Deadline: December 14, 2025 Maxwell School, Syracuse University, NY, USA June 14–26, 2026 The…

buff.ly

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing, Markus Wagner

Cas Mudde @casmudde.bsky.social · 12d

21. There was, however, one extremely positive new development, and that is the relatively new textbook by @saragoodman.bsky.social and Jennifer Cyr, a collaboration of 30+ female and non-binary scholars. ♥️

It is a breath of fresh air in the increasingly complex (U.S.) qualitative literature.

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 13d

Im Gegensatz zum Automobilbereich gibt es in der Wissenschaft hocheffiziente Verbrenner (leider)

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing

#NoCutsInHessen @nocutsinhessen.bsky.social · 14d

📢EINLADUNG: Let's stop the cuts in Hessen!🔥

Ihr seid WiMi, Prof oder ATM an einer hessischen Hochschule & habt was gegen die Kürzungen?
Dann kommt am 17.12. um 12.15 zum digitalen Vernetzungstreffen!

Dort tauschen wir Infos aus, bündeln Kräfte & werden aktiv!
Mehr Infos per dm.

🚫✂️ #nocutsinhessen

Ingo Rohlfing @ingorohlfing.bsky.social · 16d

I can't really speak for computer science, but this holds for most disciplines.

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