Mariska Leeflang
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mariskaleeflang.bsky.social
Mariska Leeflang
@mariskaleeflang.bsky.social
2.6K followers 460 following 130 posts
Professor in Clinical epidemiology, with a focus on medical tests and diagnostic test accuracy #SystematicReviews. Interested in #reproducibility of science. osiris4r.eu
#AcademicSky #EpiSky
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
cmicomms.bsky.social
📣 New #Communicable drops Mon 15 Dec!
@angelahuttner.bsky.social & @marcbonten.bsky.social invite Ilan Schwartz @germhuntermd.bsky.social , Neil Stone @drneilstone.bsky.social & Tara Smith @aetiology.bsky.social to debate staying on or leaving Twitter for alternatives 🎤

#IDTwitter #IDSky #clinmicro
December 11, 2025 at 8:34 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
tommysoutdoors.com
Can we find a middle ground between those who see the EU's wolf downlisting as a catastrophe and those who celebrate it as good news? With @hannalp.bsky.social, we discuss the frustratingly polarised debate about wolf conservation in the EU. 🌍🦤🧪🦊

🎧➡️ pod.fo/e/362998
Podcast episode cover art for Tommy's Outdoors Conservation and Science featuring a woman with glasses and dark hair pulled back, wearing a black blazer over a white top, smiling while looking downward in an indoor setting. The episode title 'EU Wolf Downlisting: Time to Stop Crying Wolf' appears in white and gold text on a dark olive green overlay in the lower left corner. The design uses an olive green background with gold border framing, and includes 'PODCAST' text at the bottom.
December 9, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
elisabethbik.bsky.social
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
@aishadown.bsky.social for @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
www.theguardian.com
December 6, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
ioanaacristea.bsky.social
Our paper on ‘super-retractors’ featured in the @retractionwatch.com digest.
December 6, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
hcp4715.bsky.social
“104 meta-analyses (86%) were fully reproducible, seven (6%) were not fully reproducible, and 10 (8%) had insufficient data available to attempt reproduction. ”

bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/...
Reproducibility of meta-analytic results in systematic reviews of interventions: meta-research study
Objective To determine how often meta-analyses of effects of interventions are reproducible.Design Meta-research study.Setting Systematic reviews with meta-analyses of the effects of health, social, b...
bmjmedicine.bmj.com
December 6, 2025 at 1:34 PM
mariskaleeflang.bsky.social
Check out this very educational papermill advent calendar 👇
abalkina.bsky.social Anna Abalkina @abalkina.bsky.social · 12d
Happy Advent! !!!🎄✨
Day 2.
Today's puzzle is about paper mills' red flags! Do you spot the problem?
papermills.tilda.ws/advent2025
December 3, 2025 at 7:41 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
olivia.science
important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense
5 Ghostwriter in the Machine A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that essentially function as lossy2 content-addressable memory: when input is given, the output generated by the model is text that stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics, Either way, even if the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents, but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes (ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company who owns the bot (see Table 2). Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors wrote those, not the search query!
October 10, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
hesterloeff.bsky.social
Als je nog een bijzonder kado zoekt voor de kerst: alles staat in dit draadje! Je kunt bestellen via DM of via mijn webshop www.hetwonderkabinet.nl maar wees wel op tijd ivm post, Ik sta komende weekenden ook op de Kerstfair bij PixLife op de Brouwersdam van vrijdag tm zondag.

Repost is lief 😊🥰🥰
December 3, 2025 at 7:16 AM
mariskaleeflang.bsky.social
#planetaryhealth
juliakoricheva.bsky.social Julia Koricheva @juliakoricheva.bsky.social · 11d
Some parasites like it hot, some don’t. Nice commentary in @pnas.org by Jukka Jokela (illustrated by @dorotdesigns.bsky.social) on our recent meta-analysis on the relationship between climate and parasitism
Commentary: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Original meta-analysis: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
December 3, 2025 at 7:31 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
olivia.science
New preprint! @marentierra.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I have been working on what CAIL means to showcase & propagate the idea of thinking very differently to tech industry norms on "artificial intelligence"

Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

1/
Figure 1: The important dimensions of CAILs across research and education; clockwise from 12 o’clock: Con- ceptual Clarity is the idea that terms should refer. Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships between statements about the world. Decoloniality is the process of de-centring and addressing dominant harmful views and practices. Respecting Expertise is the epistemic compact between professionals and society. Slow Science is a disposition towards preferring psychologically, techno-socially, and epistemically healthy practices. The lines between dimensions represent how they are interwoven both directly and indirectly.
December 2, 2025 at 6:58 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
annaalexandrova.bsky.social
Lots of great content in the latest newsletter from the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP is so good at fostering community). If you scroll all the way to the last feature I pour my heart out in the Proust Questionnaire. So good of Saana Jukola to give me the opportunity 🙏
ufeest.bsky.social Uljana Feest @ufeest.bsky.social · 18d
ok, so I'm in serious procrastination mode, which led me to read the SPSP-newletter cover to cover, enjoying the interview with @annaalexandrova.bsky.social (among other things)!
sway.cloud.microsoft/Et71m6wUBR3w...
Over and out
Please call me out if you see me on here again today
#SPSP
SPSP Newsletter # 24
November 2025
sway.cloud.microsoft
November 25, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
dsquintana.bsky.social
There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts.

Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...
This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.
November 24, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
aufdroeseler.bsky.social
Preregistrations without Code do not Prevent P-Hacking: You can increase your chances for a significant finding in the absence of real effects even with correlations and t test despite having preregistered your hypothesis (e.g., simply changing arguments in the functions).

doi.org/10.31222/osf...
November 25, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
einsteinberlin.bsky.social
🏆 Institutional: The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is a nationwide effort to evaluate research results in laboratory biology & the largest coordinated replication effort in the field worldwide, showcasing the potential of country-level research improvements. @redebrrepro.bsky.social (3/5)
November 24, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
i4replication.bsky.social
Together w/ @odissei.bsky.social, I4R is organizing CBS Replication Games, re-analyzing 6 papers w/ Dutch administrative microdata! Teams get 1 month of microdata access in Feb 2026, meeting in Utrecht for a three-day hackathon. Interested? Register by Nov 30! tinyurl.com/yx3e7b3a
November 25, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
bibliofilie.bsky.social
Op 24 november 1991 overleed de charismatische Queen-zanger Freddie Mercury, die een dag ervoor bevestigde dat hij AIDS had. Zijn fenomenale stembeheersing is mijns inziens het mooist te horen in het ontroerende 'Love of my life'.

Jullie favoriete nummer (m.u.v. 'Bohemian Rhapsody')?
November 24, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
arjanvandermeij.bsky.social
“Leer studenten hoe AI denkt: namelijk niet.” Helder pleidooi van @rensbod.bsky.social @trouw.nl
November 22, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
ylepidemiologist.bsky.social
The CDC website was quietly edited last night to claim there’s “no evidence” that vaccines don’t cause autism.

This is false.

But this is damaging, even beyond people’s confidence in vaccines.

For the first time in my career, I cannot tell people to trust what the CDC website without hesitation.
November 20, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
cmicomms.bsky.social
🌱 New opportunity: We are recruiting a new associate editor for our journal with expertise in viral infections & antiviral therapy. Read our call and apply if you're a good fit! www.cmi-comms.org/article/S295...

⏰ Deadline: 15 Dec 2025

#IDSky #clinmicro #virology #virosky
An open call to join the CMI Communications editorial team: editor in viral infections and antiviral therapy
CMI Communications, the official open-access journal of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID), is looking for an editor with strong clinical and research exper...
www.cmi-comms.org
November 18, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
repro4everyone.bsky.social
Starting in 24 hours! Be sure to register!
Participate in R4E's online seminar on November 19th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time/4 p.m. Central European Time. This event welcomes all inquisitive individuals. For more information, check out: repro4everyone.org/blog/r4e-spo...
#academicchatter #academicsky
R4E Sponsored Webinar: Applied Regression Analysis Using R — R4E
Dr. Mike Malek-Ahmadi, from Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix, AZ (USA) will be leading this workshop! This webinar will take place Wednesday November 19th, 2025. Register here This…
repro4everyone.org
November 18, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
bugsinyourguts.bsky.social
It's really not a surprise. I've spent the last 5 years explaining to researchers why samples collected over 2 consecutive EU projects and extracted using wildly different protocols are in no way comparable.

Too many labs think omics-related research is "just sequencing innit".
November 16, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
rmkubinec.bsky.social
My #rstats cheat code for today is the binom.confint function in the binom package that will spit out *12* different ways of calculating a CI for a proportion.

Also, this is why you use R for statistics...

(and of course the correct CI method is bayes 😎)
shows all the ways you can get a CI for a proportion in R
November 16, 2025 at 2:52 AM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
leuventea.bsky.social
Ready to level up your research game? Join us for our next session on transparent literature reviews! Come along in person or tune in online. All the details are below!
November 14, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Mariska Leeflang
cellpress.bsky.social
The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social
First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"
November 13, 2025 at 4:00 PM
mariskaleeflang.bsky.social
www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Interessante actie, maar is dit onderzoek of preventie (de tekst is wat ambigu)? Als je van alle acute problemen gaat tellen hoeveel mensen vapen, ga je in elk geval geen causaal verband aan kunnen tonen. Of mis ik iets?
Landelijke studie op de SEH moet verband tussen roken en acute klachten aantonen. ‘Pas als je het in cijfers ziet, dringt de schade van nicotine door’
Rookwaar: Tijdens een onderzoeksdag op de SEH van Nederlandse ziekenhuizen wordt onderzocht of acute klachten verband houden met nicotinegebruik. Artsen maken zich onder meer ernstig zorgen over jonge...
www.nrc.nl
November 14, 2025 at 6:44 AM