Critical Metascience

Tim Rakow recently published work that “investigates the claim that psychological scientists have published only a small quantity of replication research (Chambers, 2017; Ioannidis, 2012).” He found that 19% of the 1,224 psychology articles examined explicitly referred to “replication” in their studies, although “direct replications were less common than conceptual replications and replications with extension.” Rakow’s work reminds me of a theoretical paper by Stephan Guttinger...

I enjoyed making a presentation titled “Questioning Some Metascience Assumptions” to the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand on 13th August. There’s a recording of my presentation below and a copy of my slides here.

There’s a new book out on “Theory and Model Building in Psychology,” edited by Fabian Hutmacher and Alexander Wendt. You can download a copy here. Looks like a wealth of excellent work here, but, for now, I want to discuss Carlos Cornejo and Pablo Rojas’ chapter on theory aversion, methodolatry, and scientism in psychology.

Bartosz Mańákiewicz and colleagues conducted a survey of 50 experimental philosophers in order to investigate the prevalence, causes, and potential solutions to publication bias and the file-drawer problem: Contrary to the common assumption that journals reject null results, we found that most projects halt during early data analysis or presentation stages.

Dr Devezer is a Professor of Marketing, affiliate faculty at the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Science, and Assistant Director at the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (IMCI) at the University of Idaho. She holds a PhD in Marketing and an M.S. in Statistics from Washington State University. She is interested in advancing models and theories of the science of science.

Metascience is not a monolith! It has many different aspects, including the fast-growing area of feminist metascience. I’ve recently discussed feminist metascience and open science on this Substack here and here, including work by Jenni Adams, Miranda Lynn Barnes, Madeleine Pownall, Elizabeth Bennett, and others. So, it’s great to see that a special issue on the topic is forthcoming in the journal Gender and Society. Munsch, C. L., & Reyes, D. V. (2026). Feminist metascience, feminist open science?

In her new paper, Sabina Leonelli discusses three forms of structural injustice associated with disparities in scientific research: (1) resource injustice, (2) focus injustice, and (3) labour injustice.

Rena Alcalay and Joachim Vandekerckhove discuss ‚Äúepistemic disadvantage in open science practices.‚ÄĚ Following Davis-Stober et al.

Hartmut Blank and colleagues ask whether preregistration protects against the hindsight bias, in which researchers perceive their results as more predictable after they are known. As Blank et al. (2026) explained: The idea that there is hindsight bias for one’s own research predictions and that preregistration is needed to protect researchers from it has been taken for granted and has become part of the Open Science folklore.

Jenni Adams, Miranda Lynn Barnes and colleagues put together a zine on feminist open science, including some quotes from Elizabeth Bennett’s (2021) article: “Open Science From a Qualitative, Feminist Perspective.” My favourite quote from Bennett (2021) is: From which position(s) is this [open science] framework speaking? Where is it located in a hierarchy of research power and epistemological dominance? Adams, J., Needham, L., Barnes, M., Givans, S., He, S., Sadler, R., Smithson, D., & X, A.