Fundamental scientific advances can take decades to translate into improvements in human health. Shortening this interval would increase…
Research Analysis & Policy
PLOS Biology and PLOS ONE
PLOS Biology and PLOS ONE
Meta-research Collection
This Collection highlights some of PLOS Biology’s Meta-Research articles since 2016 as well as some of PLOS ONE’s articles over the past few years, all about “research on research,” or the science of science. It combines sociological, bibliometric, and more theoretical approaches to the study of science, from the structure of rewards and incentives in research to gendered dynamics, or the impact of journal policies on reproducibility.
Feature your research in this Collection by submitting to PLOS Biology or PLOS ONE.
1. Scientists, Research Assessment, and Science as a Social Endeavor
1.1. PLOS Biology Papers
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PLOS Biology Predicting translational progress in biomedical research
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PLOS Biology Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these…
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PLOS Biology Large-scale investigation of the reasons why potentially important genes are ignored
Biomedical research has been previously reported to primarily focus on a minority of all known genes. Here, we demonstrate that these…
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PLOS Biology The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented?
Women comprise a minority of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) workforce. Quantifying the gender gap…
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PLOS Biology Differences in Collaboration Patterns across Discipline, Career Stage, and Gender
Collaboration plays an increasingly important role in promoting research productivity and impact. What remains unclear is whether female…
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PLOS Biology Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level
Despite their recognized limitations, bibliometric assessments of scientific productivity have been widely adopted. We describe here an…
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Image creditBooks of Knowledge Picton Library Liverpool by Terry Kearney, CC 0
1.2. PLOS ONE Papers
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Image creditLibrary books by http://nursingschoolsnearme.com/, CC BY 2.0PLOS ONE Honest signaling in academic publishing
Academic journals provide a key quality-control mechanism in science. Yet, information asymmetries and conflicts of interests incentivize…
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PLOS ONE Publishing, signaling, social capital, and gender: Determinants of becoming a tenured professor in German political science
We apply event history analysis to analyze career and publication data of virtually all political scientists in German university…
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PLOS ONE Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biological sciences
The success of a scientist depends on their production of scientific papers and the impact factor of the journal in which they publish.…
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PLOS ONE Do successful PhD outcomes reflect the research environment rather than academic ability?
Maximising research productivity is a major focus for universities world-wide. Graduate research programs are an important driver of…
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PLOS ONE The gender gap in commenting: Women are less likely than men to comment on (men’s) published research
Subtle gender dynamics in the publishing process involving collaboration, peer-review, readership, citation, and media coverage…
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PLOS ONE Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations
Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing…
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PLOS ONE Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this…
2. Reproducibility, Research Design, and Publication Bias
2.1. PLOS Biology Papers
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PLOS Biology Leveraging vibration of effects analysis for robust discovery in observational biomedical data science
Hypothesis generation in observational, biomedical data science often starts with computing an association or identifying the statistical…
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PLOS Biology Educating the future generation of researchers: A cross-disciplinary survey of trends in analysis methods
Methods for data analysis in the biomedical, life, and social (BLS) sciences are developing at a rapid pace. At the same time, there is…
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PLOS Biology Meta-analysis of variation suggests that embracing variability improves both replicability and generalizability in preclinical research
The replicability of research results has been a cause of increasing concern to the scientific community. The long-held belief that…
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PLOS Biology Harmonization of resting-state functional MRI data across multiple imaging sites via the separation of site differences into sampling bias and measurement bias
When collecting large amounts of neuroimaging data associated with psychiatric disorders, images must be acquired from multiple sites…
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PLOS Biology Laboratory mouse housing conditions can be improved using common environmental enrichment without compromising data
Animal welfare requires the adequate housing of animals to ensure health and well-being. The application of environmental enrichment is a…
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PLOS Biology Reproducibility of preclinical animal research improves with heterogeneity of study samples
Single-laboratory studies conducted under highly standardized conditions are the gold standard in preclinical animal research. Using…
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PLOS Biology Can cancer researchers accurately judge whether preclinical reports will reproduce?
There is vigorous debate about the reproducibility of research findings in cancer biology. Whether scientists can accurately assess which…
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PLOS Biology Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature
We have empirically assessed the distribution of published effect sizes and estimated power by analyzing 26,841 statistical records from…
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PLOS Biology Authorization of Animal Experiments Is Based on Confidence Rather than Evidence of Scientific Rigor
Accumulating evidence indicates high risk of bias in preclinical animal research, questioning the scientific validity and reproducibility…
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PLOS Biology Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency
Beginning January 2014, Psychological Science gave authors the opportunity to signal open data and materials if they qualified for badges…
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PLOS Biology Reproducible Research Practices and Transparency across the Biomedical Literature
There is a growing movement to encourage reproducibility and transparency practices in the scientific community, including public access…
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PLOS Biology Where Have All the Rodents Gone? The Effects of Attrition in Experimental Research on Cancer and Stroke
Given small sample sizes, loss of animals in preclinical experiments can dramatically alter results. However, effects of attrition on…
2.2. PLOS ONE Papers
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PLOS ONE Predicting replicability—Analysis of survey and prediction market data from large-scale forecasting projects
The reproducibility of published research has become an important topic in science policy. A number of large-scale replication projects…
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PLOS ONE Reproducibility of individual effect sizes in meta-analyses in psychology
To determine the reproducibility of psychological meta-analyses, we investigated whether we could reproduce 500 primary study effect sizes…
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PLOS ONE Repeatability analysis improves the reliability of behavioral data
Reliability of data has become a major concern in the course of the reproducibility crisis. Especially when studying animal behavior,…
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Image creditPerson writing in notebook by Oat Boat, CC BY 2.0PLOS ONE Assessment of publication bias and outcome reporting bias in systematic reviews of health services and delivery research: A meta-epidemiological study
Strategies to identify and mitigate publication bias and outcome reporting bias are frequently adopted in systematic reviews of clinical…
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PLOS ONE Publication bias examined in meta-analyses from psychology and medicine: A meta-meta-analysis
Publication bias is a substantial problem for the credibility of research in general and of meta-analyses in particular, as it yields…
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PLOS ONE Reproducible big data science: A case study in continuous FAIRness
Big biomedical data create exciting opportunities for discovery, but make it difficult to capture analyses and outputs in forms that are…
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PLOS ONE Simple changes of individual studies can improve the reproducibility of the biomedical scientific process as a whole
We developed a new probabilistic model to assess the impact of recommendations rectifying the reproducibility crisis (by publishing both…
3. Publishing and Research Dissemination
3.1. PLOS Biology papers
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PLOS Biology Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity
The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of…
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PLOS Biology What’s not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #InMice
There is increasing scrutiny around how science is communicated to the public. For instance, a Twitter account @justsaysinmice (with 70.4K…
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PLOS Biology Epidemiology and reporting characteristics of preclinical systematic reviews
In an effort to better utilize published evidence obtained from animal experiments, systematic reviews of preclinical studies are…
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PLOS Biology The evolving role of preprints in the dissemination of COVID-19 research and their impact on the science communication landscape
The world continues to face a life-threatening viral pandemic. The virus underlying the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Severe Acute…
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PLOS Biology Creating clear and informative image-based figures for scientific publications
Scientists routinely use images to display data. Readers often examine figures first; therefore, it is important that figures are…
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PLOS Biology Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation
Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of…
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PLOS Biology Preclinical efficacy studies in investigator brochures: Do they enable risk–benefit assessment?
Human protection policies require favorable risk–benefit judgments prior to launch of clinical trials. For phase I and II trials, evidence…
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PLOS Biology ‘Spin’ in published biomedical literature: A methodological systematic review
In the scientific literature, spin refers to reporting practices that distort the interpretation of results and mislead readers so that…
3.2. PLOS ONE papers
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PLOS ONE Peer review and preprint policies are unclear at most major journals
Clear and findable publishing policies are important for authors to choose appropriate journals for publication. We investigated the…
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PLOS ONE How often do leading biomedical journals use statistical experts to evaluate statistical methods? The results of a survey
Scientific claims in biomedical research are typically derived from statistical analyses. However, misuse or misunderstanding of…
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PLOS ONE Relationships among commercial practices and author conflicts of interest in biomedical publishing
Recently, concerns have been raised over the potential impacts of commercial relationships on editorial practices in biomedical…
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PLOS ONE The citation advantage of linking publications to research data
Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging or mandating authors to…
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PLOS ONE Journal data policies: Exploring how the understanding of editors and authors corresponds to the policies themselves
Despite the increase in the number of journals issuing data policies requiring authors to make data underlying reporting findings publicly…
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PLOS ONE A study of the impact of data sharing on article citations using journal policies as a natural experiment
This study estimates the effect of data sharing on the citations of academic articles, using journal policies as a natural experiment. We…
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PLOS ONE The high resource impact of reformatting requirements for scientific papers
Background: Most research manuscripts are not accepted for publication on first submission. A major part of the resubmission process is…
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PLOS ONE Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting
Objective: To conduct a time-cost analysis of formatting in scientific publishing. Design: International, cross-sectional study (one-time…
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PLOS ONE Data sharing in PLOS ONE: An analysis of Data Availability Statements
A number of publishers and funders, including PLOS, have recently adopted policies requiring researchers to share the data underlying…