Scientific investigations don’t have to (should not!) stop when a paper is accepted for publication in a peer-review journal. This is probably one of the main advantages of using social media in academia: they are places for sharing results and commenting them. There is no reason why peer-review should only happen before publication, so any feedback is welcome anytime! Let’s just make sure the critiques remain courteous and constructive so people don’t feel personally mocked or attacked. That could help avoid another ridiculous methodological terrorism debate and instead spend our time and energy improving our methods and approaches.
In line with this positive impact of social media to research quality, I posted on twitter early September after the above mentioned paper was accepted in Alzheimer’s and dementia. I got interesting feedback, comments and questions regarding some of our results, and notably the potential impact of outliers in some the analyses. In the attached document, you can find additional analyses and figures I conducted accordingly.
- Good point: these additional analyses all confirmed the original results.
- Bummer: the paper processing was too advanced for me to modify the final version of the article, so these (beautiful) figures and results will not be included in the final article.
Renaud La Joie 