journal club /ˈdʒɜrnəl klʌb/ n. a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the academic literature, generally of some branch of science or philosophy.
In February 2013, I started organising a weekly journal club for students taking my course Research Methods in the second year of the Psych bachelor. This was only meant to run for 7 weeks and focus on articles with interesting methodologies, but after the course ended, we decided it was fun enough to keep doing it year-round and we haven’t stopped since then.
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What we’re reading this year
- February 19th – Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses, by Scheel, Tiokhin, Isager, & Lakens
- March 4th – Experimenter as automaton; experimenter as human: exploring the position of the researcher in scientific research, by Field and Derksen
- March 18th – “It’s an ongoing process”: A qualitative analysis of men’s feminist identity growth, by Siegel, Elbe, & Calogero
- April 22nd – An experimental manipulation of the value of effort, by Lin, Westbrook, Fan, & Inzlicht
- TBA
Archives
2022-2023
- February 13th – Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty, by Massey
- 6th March 6th– A discipline-wide investigation of the replicability of Psychology papers over the past two decades, by Wu Youyou, Yang Yang, and Brian Uzzi
- March 20th – The critiques and criticisms of positive psychology: a systematic review, by van Zyl, Gaffaney, van der Vaart, Dik, & Donaldson
2021-2022
- February 10th – The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward, by Markus Eronen and Laura Bringmann
- February 24th – Insights and perspectives on the replication crisis, a Bachelor Thesis presentation
- March 10th – Small Telescopes: Detectability and the Evaluation of Replication Results, by Uri Simonsohn
- April 21st – Putting the Self in Self-Correction: Findings From the Loss-of-Confidence Project, by Julia M. Rohrer
2020-2021
At the start of the 2020-2021 academic year, Journal Club put on its fancy clothes and became Book Club for a while. Through 8 meetings, we read and talked about Stuart Ritchie’s thriller Science Fictions, which came out in August of 2020 and deals with the ways scientific results may reflect bias, hype, or outright fraud, instead of being a reliable and valid description of reality (whatever we accept that to mean).
The schedule was:
- September 14th, 16:00 – Introductions and Ch1 How Science Works (Tassos)
- September 28th, 16:00 – Ch2 The Replication Crisis (Maria)
- October 12th, 16:00 – Ch3 Fraud (Peter)
- October 26th, 16:00 – Ch4 Bias (Nadine)
- November 9th, 16:00 – Ch5 Negligence (Corné)
- November 23rd, 16:00 – Ch6 Hype (Calum)
- December 7th, 16:00 – Ch7 Perverse Incentives (Tassos)
- December 21st, 16:00 – Ch8 Fixing Science (Sven)
2019-2020
February 24th – Preregistration Is Hard, And Worthwhile, by Nosek et al. and Is Preregistration Worthwhile? by Szollosi et al.
February 10th – Crud (Re)defined by Orben and Lakens
January 27th – Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future by Morin
December 16th – Replicator degrees of freedom allow publication of misleading failures to replicate by Ryan, Yeager, and O’Brien
November 18th – The SFDORA declaration and Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations by McKiernan et al.
October 21st – The natural selection of bad science by Smaldino and McElreath
October 7th – Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05” by Wasserstein, Schirm & Lazar
2018-2019
June 3rd – Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05” by Wasserstein, Schirm & Lazar
May 20th – Mere Exposure to Money Increases Endorsement of Free-Market Systems and Social Inequality by Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz
March 8th – Altruistic indulgence: people voluntarily consume high-calorie foods to make other people feel comfortable and pleasant by Lee and Kim
March 1st – Weight as an Embodiment of Importance by Jostmann, Lakens, and Schubert
February 22nd – Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind by Wilson et al.
February 15th – A taste of Kandinsky: assessing the influence of the artistic visual presentation of food on the dining experience by Michel et al.
2017-2018
April 23rd – Incidental haptic sensations influence judgment of crimes by Schaefer, Cherkasskiy, Denke, Spies, Song, Malahy, Heinz, & Bargh
March 5th – Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour, by L.A. Henkel
February 12th – Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption, by A.R. Brough, J.E.B. Wilkie, J. Ma, M.S. Isaac, and D. Gal
October 16th – Cold-Blooded Attention: Finger Temperature Predicts Attentional Performance, by Vergara, Moënne-Loccoz, and Maldonado
September 25th – Why Summaries of Research on Psychological Research Are Often Uninterpretable, by Paul E. Meehl
2016-2017
May 15th – The meaning of “significance” for different types of tests, by de Groot Translated and Annotated by Eric–Jan Wagenmakers, Denny Borsboom, Josine Verhagen, Rogier Kievit, Marjan Bakker, Angelique Cramer, Dora Matzke, Don Mellenbergh, and Han L. J. van der Maas (Tassos)
April 10th – Critical Analysis: A Comparison of Critical Thinking Changes in Psychology and Philosophy Classes, by Sears, Kraus, and Roberts-Cady (Steve)
March 13th – The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, by Abraham Flexner (Tassos)
February 27th – Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition, by Edwards and Roy (Alex)
February 13th – Eating Heavily: Men Eat More in the Company of Women, by Kniffin, Sigirci, and Wansink (Nils)
January 30th – Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking, by Jelte M. Wicherts*, Coosje L. S. Veldkamp, Hilde E. M. Augusteijn, Marjan Bakker, Robbie C. M. van Aert and Marcel A. L. M. van Assen (Andrea)
January 9th – Human face processing is tuned to sexual age preferences, by Ponseti, Granert, van Eimeren, Jansen, Wolff, Beier, Deuschl, Bosinski, and Siebner (Paula)
December 19th – Rethinking Theoretical Approaches to Stigma, by Martin, Lang, and Olafsdottir (Steve)
December 5th – The Subjectifying Social Sciences, by Dreyfus and Rabinow (from their book “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics”)
October 19th – Higher body mass index is associated with episodic memory deficits in young adults, by Cheke, Simons, & Clayton (Nikolai)
October 3rd – Internal consistency predicts attractiveness in biological motion walkers, by Klüver, Hecht, and Troje (Max)
September 26th – Weight as an embodiment of importance, by Jostmann, Lakens, and Schubert (Tassos)
September 12th – Publication Bias and the Canonization of False Facts, by Nissen, Magidson, Gross, and Bergstrom (Tassos)
2015-2016
April 11th – Charting the future of social psychology on stormy seas: Winners, losers, and recommendations, by Baumeister (Tassos)
March 14th – Investigating Variation in Replicability: A “Many Labs” Replication Project, by Klein et al (Moritz)
February 29th – P-Curve, a Key to the File Drawer Problem, by Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons (Tassos)
February 8th – Strong Inference, by John Platt (Steve)
January 18th – Development of Interpersonal Coordination Between Peers During a Drumming Task, by Endendijk, Ramenzoni, Cox, Cillessen, Bekkering, and Hunnius (Nikolai)
December 14th – Preliminary Support for a Generalized Arousal Model of Political Conservatism, by Tritt, S.M, Inzlicht, M, and Peterson, J.B. (Marcel)
November 30th – Negotiating pictures of numbers, Alač, M. (Steve)
November 16th – Corvid Re-Caching without ‘Theory of Mind’: A Model, by van der Vaart, E., Verbrugge, R. and Hemelrijk, C.K. (Tassos)
October 15th – Sadness Impairs Color Perception, by Thorstenson, C.A. Pazda, A.D., and Elliot, A.J. (Tassos)
2014-2015
May 8th – A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to Remember Than Others, by Kesebir, S. and Oishi, S. (Tassos)
March 2nd – Seeking professional help: Etiology beliefs about mental illness across cultures, by Chen S.X. and Mak W.W.S. (Jessie)
February 23rd – Contemporary neuroscience in the media, by Racine E., Waldman S., Rosenberg J., and Illes J. (Yavor)
February 9th – Natural Language Metaphors Covertly Influence Reasoning, by Thibodeau, P.H. and Boroditsky, L. (Tassos)
January 30th – The Value of Believing in Free Will; Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating, by Vohs, K.D. and Schooler, J.W. (Boris)
January 16th – Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later, by Griffiths, R., Richards, W., Johnson, M., McCann, U., and Jesse, R. (Marco)
December 12th – The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research, by Hunt, L.M. and Megyesi, M.S. (Boris)
November 28th – Possible role of more positive social behaviour in the clinical effect of antidepressant drugs, by Young, S.N., Moskowitz, D.S, and aan het Rot, M. (Marije)
November 14th – When What You Hear Influences When You See: Listening to an Auditory Rhythm Influences the Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention, by Miller, J.E., Carlson, L.A., and McAuley, J.D. (Nikolai)
October 24th – Power Increases Social Distance, by Lammers, J., Galinsky, A.D., Gordijn, E.H., and Otten, S. (Flo)
October 10th – Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students, by Moss-Racusina, C.A., Dovidiob, J.F., Brescollc, V.L., Grahama, M.J., and Handelsmana, J. (Tassos)
2013-2014
June 4th – Medicalization. A new deal on disease definition, by Moynihan, R. (Thole)
May 28th – What Makes a Good Student? How Emotions, Self-Regulated Learning, and Motivation Contribute to Academic Achievement, by Mega, C., Ronconi, L. and De Beni, R. (Julian)
May 21st – Pornography Use: Who Uses It and How It Is Associated with Couple Outcomes, by Poulsen, F.O., Busby, D.M., and Galovan, A.M. (Flo)
May 14th – Imprisoned by the past: Unhappy moods lead to a retrospective bias to mind wandering, by Smallwood, J. and O’Connor, R.C. (Julian)
April 30th – Competing Speech Perception in Older and Younger Adults: Behavioral and Eye-Movement Evidence, by Helfer, K.S. and Staub, A. (Hanna)
March 26th – Publication and other reporting biases in cognitive sciences: detection, prevalence, and prevention, by Ioannidis, J.P.A, Munafò, M.R., Fusar-Poli, P., Nosek, B.A., And David, S.P.
March 12th – Two Birds with One Stone: A Pre Registered Adversarial Collaboration on Horizontal Eye Movements in Free Recall, by Matzke, D., Nieuwenhuis, S., van Rijn, H., Slagter, H.A., van der Molen, M.W., and Wagenmakers, E-J.
March 6th – Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, Conventionality , Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity, by Vohs, Redden, and Rahinel.
February 19th – Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices With Incentives for Truth Telling, by John, Loewenstein, and Prelec.
February 12th – “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences, by Fanelli, D.