Dear workshop participants,
We have funds to bring a small number of US graduate students and post-docs to the workshop on improving inference in evolutionary biology and ecology.
If you know of a student or post-doc with an interest in issues related to the workshop (reducing type I error, promoting replication and meta-analysis), please encourage her or him to apply to attend.
Applicants should include a one-page cover letter explaining their interest in one or more of the workshop goals, a C.V., and the name of an established scientist who can comment on their suitability to attend this workshop.
Selected applicants will have their travel and lodging covered and will be full participants in the workshop. The workshop will be held Thursday and Friday November 12 and 13, 2015 in Charlottesville, VA.
By the evening of Friday September 11 please email materials to Tim Parker (parkerth@whitman.edu).
Please also direct questions to me.
Here is some more information on the workshop which can be shared with potential applicants:
A hallmark of effective science is reproducible results. Unfortunately, obstacles often slow progress towards these robust, reproducible observations in ecology and evolutionary biology as well as in many other disciplines. Scientists are rewarded for publicizing exciting results, but scientists have much less incentive to publish unexciting results or to test the reproducibility of previously published findings. Scientists therefore sometimes search their data for the most exciting findings that will allow them to publish in the most prestigious journals, and they may not invest in seeking to publish their full set of results. This and various related practices leads to an inflated rate of published false positives –results that are the outcome of chance rather than real biological phenomena. Because attempts to replicate prior findings are often rare, the error of these false positives often goes unrecognized for long periods. Even when replications exist, drawing conclusions from them is hindered by a lack of standards to promote effective syntheses across studies. Reducing bias and promoting replication and effective synthesis will require changing the institutions that control the incentives currently guiding scientists’ decisions. One of the major classes of institutions shaping incentives is scientific journals. Journals in some disciplines, such as psychology and neuroscience, have begun introducing innovative editorial policies to reduce bias and facilitate replication. Now ecologists and evolutionary biologists are seeking to develop ideas appropriate for their own disciplines.
At this workshop, prominent journal editors in ecology and evolutionary biology will join with funding panelists and researchers interested in improving scientific inference to develop incentive structures to reduce false positive rates, promote replication, and facilitate research synthesis. By the end of the workshop, the organizers hope to have editorial policy templates and other ideas for shaping incentive structures that make sense for these disciplines. The organizers also hope that journal editors and others will then implement policies that are right for their disciplines and journals, and that the discussions that follow in the wake of these initial policy implementations will promote more widespread adoptions of policies that improve empirical progress in these disciplines.
Sincerely,
Tim Parker
Improving inference in evolutionary biology and ecology
Workshop co-organizer
Interdisciplinary Program in Environmental Studies
Chair, Department of Biology
Whitman College, Walla Walla WA 99362 USA
