Chris Chambers’s radical plan for Psychological Science

Someone pointed me to this Vision Statement by Chris Chambers, a psychology professor who would like to edit Psychological Science, a journal that just a few years ago was notorious for publishing really bad junk science. Not as bad as PNAS at its worst, perhaps, but pretty bad. Especially because they didn’t just publish junk, they actively promoted it. Indeed, as late as 2021 the Association for Psychological Science was promoting the ridiculous “lucky golf ball” paper they’d published back in the bad old days of 2010.

So it does seem that the Association for Psychological Science and its journals are ripe for a new vision.

See here for further background.

Chambers has a 12-point action plan. It’s full of details about Accountable Replications and Exploratory Reports and all sorts of other things that I don’t really know about, so if you’re interested I recommend you just follow the link and take a look for yourself.

My personal recommendation is that authors when responding to criticism not be allowed to claim that the discovery of errors “does not change the conclusion of the paper.” Or, if authors want to make that claim, they should be required to make it before publication, a kind of declaration of results independence. Something like this: “The authors attest that they believe their results so strongly that, no matter what errors are found in their data or analysis, they will not change their beliefs about the results.” Just get it out of the way already; this will save everyone lots of time that might otherwise be spent reading the paper.