Robbie van Aert Wins a Veni Grant for his Research on Meta-Analysis, Preregistration, and Replication

We are very happy to announce that Robbie van Aert was awarded a NWO Veni grant (€280.000) for his research entitled “Empowering meta-analysis by taking advantage of preregistered and replication studies”.

Below you can find a short description of the proposed research:

An important threat to the validity of meta-analyses is publication bias. Replication and preregistered studies are deemed less susceptible to publication bias. I will develop a novel meta-analysis methodology that optimally synthesizes conventional with replication/preregistered studies and corrects for publication bias. This new methodology yields more accurate conclusions in meta-analyses.

Young eScientist Award to Improve "statcheck"

The Netherlands eScience Center awarded our team member Michèle Nuijten and our colleague from social psychology Willem Sleegers the Young eScientist Award for their proposal to improve statcheck. The prize consists of €50,000 worth of expertise from the eScience Center, which will be used to expand statcheck’s search algorithm with more advanced techniques such as Natural Language Processing.

“‘We are […] very excited to collaborate with the eScience Center to improve statcheck’s searching algorithm to make it ‘smarter’ in recognizing statistical results so that it can also spot errors in other scientific fields. We are confident that by collaborating with the eScience Center, we can expand statcheck to improve scientific quality on an even larger scale.’”

— Michèle & Willem

For more information, see https://www.esciencecenter.nl/news/chris-broekema-and-michele-nuijten-winners-of-the-young-escientist-award-2020/

Leonie Van Grootel won the Thomas C. Chalmers Award

In 2018, the winner of best short oral presentation winner was Leonie Van Grootel for 'Using Bayesian information for matchinig qualitative and quantative sources in a mixed studies review'. 

In 2018, the winner of best short oral presentation winner was Leonie Van Grootel for 'Using Bayesian information for matchinig qualitative and quantative sources in a mixed studies review'. 

— Cochrane’s Blog

Michèle Wins the Tilburg University Dissertation Prize

We are excited to announce that Michèle has won the Tilburg University Dissertation Prize with her PhD Thesis “Research on Research: A Meta-Scientific Study of Problems and Solutions in Psychological Science”.

In her thank-you speech, Michèle emphasized the importance of interdisciplinarity in solving the replicability problems: “I think researchers from different fields should be open to learn the best practices from other fields.”

She ended by thanking Tilburg University for this prize, also because “it shows me that Tilburg University thinks it is good to be critical about the scientific system, and that open science is an important step forward.”

The full thesis can be found online at https://psyarxiv.com/qtk7e.