Adrian Barnett

@aidybarnett.bsky.social

810 followers 600 following 140 posts

Statistician working in meta-research. Deltiologist.

Videos

Adrian Gerard Barnett is a professor in the faculty of Health in the school of Public Health and Social Work, at Queensland University of Technology and was president of the Statistical Society of Australia from 2018 to 2020. .. more

Environmental science 27%

Public Health 23%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Adrian Barnett, Paul Nightingale

Graham Kendall @grahamkendall.bsky.social · 2d

Can you justify using (and paying for) a service that generates a ready to submit paper with just one prompt?
🧵

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Accountability in Research: Ethics, Integrity, and Policy @accountabilityair.bsky.social · 4d

📝 Latest Article Commentary Alert! 📝

"Closing the paper mines"

@aidybarnett.bsky.social & @jabyrnesci.bsky.social

→ doi.org/10.1080/0898...

#PaperMill
#ResearchMisconduct
#AI
#GenAI
#ResearchIntegrity

Closing the paper mines

Scientific fakery is a centuries old problem. Twinned with the long history of hard-working scientists earning fame for genuine discoveries, runs a tawdry history of those who were willing fabricat...

doi.org

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 9d

An outstanding long-read on research integrity and outright lies. It made me gasp out loud. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?

After a newborn died of opioid poisoning, a new branch of pediatrics came into being. But the evidence doesn’t add up.

www.newyorker.com

Reposted by Adrian Barnett, Jörg Oechssler

Nick Brown @steamtraen.eu · 10d

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520...

Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Adrian Barnett, Alan Richardson , and 1 more Dorothy Bishop, Adrian Barnett, Alan Richardson, Karen O’Leary

AusHSI @aushsi.bsky.social · 11d

“If fabricated studies make their way into the evidence base, they can mislead real scientists and ultimately slow progress for patients."

Published in The BMJ, a new AI tool developed by @aidybarnett.bsky.social and colleagues has exposed the scale of fake studies flooding cancer research.

New tool exposes scale of fake research flooding cancer science

A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”.

www.qut.edu.au

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 11d

Everybody loses when research results are changed or supressed. This is an ongoing problem in Australia. As a start, we need a conversation between researchers and bureaucrats/lawyers.

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 11d

Rules around government-sanctioned research can leave academics in a no-win position by forcing them to accept revisions that violate their ethical obligations, a Queensland analysis suggests #academicsky
ow.ly/IZUJ50Y4PJ6

Funder review rights ‘leave researchers in impossible position’

Mandatory edits of research findings a ‘blind spot’ in integrity debate, says scholar who experienced government agency ‘interference’

ow.ly

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 11d

Funder review rights ‘leave researchers in impossible position’

Mandatory edits of research findings a ‘blind spot’ in integrity debate, says scholar who experienced government agency ‘interference’

ow.ly

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

The Medical Journal of Australia @mja.com.au · 16d

Fellowship schemes by Australian funding agencies invite researchers to disclose personal career disruptions to promote equity. But this well-meaning policy can expose private medical details to non-medically trained reviewers and create new risks of bias

Read more: buff.ly/BriGjyG

Reposted by Tracy Creagh

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 21d

Less is more. This aphorism is constantly on my mind. The scientific publication system is under tremendous strain, the last thing it needs is a massive dump of LLM generated/aided papers. If you love science, then show it some love. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too

If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

www.nature.com

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 23d

This is a statistical blunder that I've never seen before. Excluding zeros and ones because they didn't give a usable number after log-transforming. No idea why they simply didn't add a constant before transforming, or better still use a Poisson model.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 23d

A wonderful article from the ABC on Mercy Ships www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

On the world's largest hospital ship volunteers give people a chance at a better life

On the largest civilian hospital ship in the world, Australian volunteers provide life-changing healthcare that is transforming lives.

www.abc.net.au

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 25d

Number of days since I've seen an emu: 0.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 29d

A case study on how an Australian government agency changed the results of a qualitative study. Editing or suppressing research findings is not good policy, can lead to harms, and is awful to experience as a researcher.
Journal: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
OA: eprints.qut.edu.au/262261/

Client Challenge

link.springer.com

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Timothy Caulfield @caulfieldtim.bsky.social · 29d

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n... via @statnews.com

The complete collapse of the NIH, CDC, and FDA is so tragic and damaging to not only the U.S., but the world...

Dark Age 2.0.

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left

“We can no longer lend our credibility to an organization that has lost its integrity,” write four scientists and administrators who recently resigned from the NIH.

www.statnews.com

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Jan 3

I read this excellent book last year about the US coup in Guatemala. So much death and destruction built on lies.

Book cover: Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala

Reposted by Adrian Barnett, Paul Nightingale

Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · Dec 31

"It might be easy to dismiss the idea of ISO 9001 as just another tool to encourage best practice among publishers. But journal certification would fill a long-standing gap in the chain of external oversight from conduct to translation of research."

@jabyrnesci.bsky.social writes in @nature.com !

Put pressure on publishers to follow best practice — external regulation is the answer

Journals that work hard to meet the needs of both authors and readers should be acknowledged publicly — encouraging others to follow suit.

doi.org

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 30

Swallowtail butterfly in my garden.

Black white and red butterfly resting on a tree.

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

eLife @elife.bsky.social · Dec 29

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited?

Coercive citations

Reviewer citation requests can turn peer review into a transaction rather than an objective critique of the article.

buff.ly

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 24

Cycling in snow is joyous.

Reposted by Adrian Barnett

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · Dec 19

"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?"

The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

www.nature.com

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 16

Such important work. Thank you both for helping to eradicate fakes from the scientific record.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 16

Holiday

Little brown dog on a sandy beach in the wind

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 11

Rather than investing in the energy that "will never kill us or never run out" (Will Self) our state government is pouring money into coal. A sad short-term gamble to win votes.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 11

Was a preprint, now a paper. Our experiment on researchers preferences for published papers. Disappointingly, the journal impact factor still dominates, and even worse, some authors are willing to sacrifice their results for a higher impact factor. www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docum...

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Dec 6

100%. If a study is beyond the capabilities of you and your team, then do a different study.

Reposted by Jan R. Boehnke

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Nov 29

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited? Version of record at
@elife.bsky.social. Thorough and useful peer review - who needs and impact factor?!

Links to paper and code/data ⬇️

📄https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/108748
💻https://github.com/agbarnett/cited_reviewers

elifesciences.org

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Nov 27

Bloom

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Nov 24

Cracked my car window 😒

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Nov 21

At a repair cafe getting a music stand fixed and it is an absolute joy of positivity and community spirit.

Inside a scout hut with handy people fixing stuff.

Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · Nov 21

It's been great to be part of something positive and new.

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