Ontboezemingen van wetenschappers

Met deze tweet van 7 januari ontketende dr_leigh een trending toppic in de wetenschappelijke wereld. Duizenden wetenschappers biechten sindsdien hun kleine foutjes aan Twitter op.

Bepalen van je onderzoeksvraag katee_q : I’m only doing this project because my supervisor would like a grant so he can stay employed next year (so would I) drugmonkeyblog : Because describing it this way makes our fishing expedition look like rigorous hypothesis testing. angel_machine : Subject is haplogroup H because the sequencer blew up and we didn’t have enough money to run the samples again.

Bepalen van je onderzoeksdesign mahfacehurts : we tested the substrate using this complex because VWR had it in stock and it was under $100 sharoz : We ran 5 subjects because although we had strong significance after 4, a reviewer said it sounded too low iamlaranjinha : Participants were given a questionaire which I modified frm the last rscher bc I didn’t hv time to construct a new one.

Uitvoeren van je onderzoek: dataverzameling madradish : The control cohort was made up of anyone in the building we could bribe with freddo frogs. This is true one_wyz_womn : We interviewed a subsample of the participants because they were the ones who called us back SubSAMpling : We used female rats because the undergrad couldn’t stop laughing at the size of the males’ testicles. a_c_g : Field counts were much lower in summer 2007 because the undergrad we hired to do them was a huge stoner.

Uitvoeren van je onderzoek: databewerking benosaka : Blood samples were spun at 1500rpm because the centrifuge made a scary noise at higher speeds. cueviss : Samples were centrifuged for 5’ instead of 15’ because I had to go lactate before lab meeting. StuartRJackson : Sample 3 was removed due to unidentified contamination (I spilled my coffee). biolumiJEFFence : We chose a one-way ANOVA design for the experiment because we didn’t want to deal with complicated statistics Hypnos_Awake : The samples were analyzed by politely asking a lab technician who actually knows what they’re doing to do it. AndreaKuszewski : Answers were rated on a scale from ‘the answer I am looking for’ to ‘I can’t read this shit’. DrMobs : We developed our multivariate regression model by including the numbered covariates that came up in Lotto that week. stephentang : Responses were coded into 3 categories, which was the number of different highlighters I had (my yellow one ran out)

Schrijven over je onderzoek MissSinBin : Author 4 actually did 90% of the work on this paper, but her PI hated her at the time. shogur : author contributions: lab technician in “acknowledgements” did more work than all co-authors matingmind : Self-citations were disguised by referencing only papers in which we were the 4th or later co-authors #et al. RobustoUNC : We would like bow to social convention and thank the anonymous reviewers for their delayed and unhelpful suggestions everyfragment : the overly vague abstract is because the analysis proves the months spent researching were a waste of everyone’s time DearCordias : The PI on this project rewrote the entire manuscript I submitted. Now I’m second author. andrew_matteson : We chose this signaling pathway so we could submit to a conference about it in Hawaii. shogur : “further study should clarify this issue” = we are ditching this shit project

In haar rede ter gelegenheid van de 381ste dies natalis van de Universiteit van Amsterdam (8 januari 2013), getiteld Een beetje moeilijker graag, wenst prof. dr. Dymph van den Boom: “Ik zou willen dat onze studenten ‘competente rebellen’ worden. Rebellen in de intellectuele zin van het woord. Omdat er nog te veel geaccepteerde dogma’s zijn die ter discussie gesteld moeten worden en, indien nodig, vervangen, als we het erover eens zijn dat de huidige staat van de wereld een knoeiboel is en dat op zijn minst sommige van onze foutieve denkwijzen ons daar gebracht hebben.” Vervang “de huidige staat van de wereld” met “de huidige staat van de wetenschap”, dan weten de competente rebellen waar ze een begin kunnen maken. Met ontboezemingen.