research methods

Beyond the paper: Why open science is the new research standard

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A look at the global shift to open science, exploring how transparency, preregistration, and open data are becoming the new standard for credible research, benefiting scientists, funders and society.

Scaling systematic reviews: A solo researcher's workflow with Gemini

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Conducting systematic literature reviews is traditionally a laborious, manual process involving the extraction of distinct data points from hundreds of academic papers, but this presentation introduces a structured, multi-tool workflow using the …

Making research materials Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable

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To err is human, but when it comes to creating research materials, mistakes can be reduced by sharing more of our work and by using some helpful tools. For instance, we can make our research materials FAIRer—that is, more Findable, Accessible, …

R functions for checking and fixing vmrk files from BrainVision

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Electroencephalography (EEG) has become a cornerstone for understanding the intricate workings of the human brain in the field of neuroscience. However, EEG software and hardware come with their own set of constraints, particularly in the management of markers, also known as triggers. This article aims to shed light on these limitations and future prospects of marker management in EEG studies, while also introducing R functions that can help deal with vmrk files from BrainVision.

rscopus_plus: An extension of the rscopus package

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Sometimes it’s useful to do a bibliometric analysis. To this end, the rscopus_plus functions (Bernabeu, 2024) extend the R package rscopus (Muschelli, 2022) to administer the search quota and enable specific searches and comparisons. scopus_search_plus runs rscopus::scopus_search as many times as necessary based on the number of results and the search quota. scopus_search_DOIs gets DOIs from scopus_search_plus, which can then be imported into a reference manager, such as Zotero, to create a list of references.

A session logbook for a longitudinal study using conditional formatting in Excel

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An Excel workbook template with conditional formatting to facilitate planning, registration, and tracking of sessions in longitudinal studies involving multiple session conductors.

Motivating a preregistration (especially in experimental linguistics)

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The best argument to motivate a preregistration may be that it doesn’t take any extra time. It just requires frontloading an important portion of the work. As a reward, the paper will receive greater trust from the reviewers and the readers at large. Preregistration is not perfect, but is a lesser evil that reduces the misuse of statistical analysis in science.

Learning how to use Zotero

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Learning Zotero requires approximately 10 hours of investment that will pay off through time savings in formatting and correcting references.

FAQs on mixed-effects models

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Frequently asked questions about mixed-effects models, covering the necessity of random slopes, appropriate p-value calculation methods, parallelization limitations, convergence issues, and optimizer selection.

FAIR standards for the creation of research materials, with examples

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In the fast-paced world of scientific research, establishing minimum standards for the creation of research materials is essential. Whether it's stimuli, custom software for data collection, or scripts for statistical analysis, the quality and transparency of these materials significantly impact the reproducibility and credibility of research. This blog post explores the importance of adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, and offers practical examples for researchers, with a focus on the cognitive sciences.