100 books like Research Methods in Psychology

Ritchie was part of a team that attempted to replicate a famous study led by a prominent psychologist, Daryl Bem, claiming that people did better on a word memorization test if they studied the words after taking the test.

Ritchie and his co-authors attempted to replicate this study and found no evidence supporting Bem’s claim. This is but one example of a scientific crisis in that attempts to replicate influential studies published in top peer-reviewed journals fail nearly half the time. Ritchie explains and illustrates the reasons for the current replication crisis in science.

You may have heard of ‘significance testing,’ and the magical ‘p < .05,’ which somehow makes a research result ‘significant,’ which is often taken as (almost) ‘true.’ Even if you haven’t heard of all that, Kline explains clearly why significance testing has been disastrous for science, leading to misleading conclusions and much valuable research not even being reported.

He draws on my work to explain how ‘the new statistics’ (estimation) is a much better way to understand results. The first chapter is fairly easy to read. Later chapters are also terrific but get more technical as Kline explains lots of ways to do things better. As I’m quoted on the back cover, “Read this book and see the future!” Happily, the future is increasingly looking as Kline recommended.

Another research design textbook, this one more specifically about neuroscience. My co-author, neuroscientist Robert Calin-Jageman, highly recommends it.

This third edition has clear and up-to-date discussions of issues such as p hacking and publication bias that emphasise the need for Open Science. There’s a focus on effect sizes and confidence intervals, as in the new statistics. The book also describes strategies needed to enhance the rigor and reproducibility of neuroscience research.

Charlotte Pennington eagerly started her PhD but became anxious and depressed when her experiments "didn’t work’" and were refused publication. She read about the replication crisis — many published studies won’t replicate—and Open Science. Soon, it was her passion to teach about Open Science and what’s needed to achieve efficient research and trustworthy research literature.

The result is A Student’s Guide to Open Science. It’s short, clear, and highly readable. She’s well-informed and covers the story in engaging detail. There are practical guides to using Open Science practices and numerous links to follow as you wish. Statistical issues are mentioned but are not her focus.

Though this book focuses on psychology, it has lessons for all social sciences.

Chambers, like me, is critical of certain practices and yet deeply respectful of what has been accomplished. He devotes much of his attention to the problem of confirmation bias. We as humans are more likely to accept results that conform to prior beliefs.

Journals are also more likely to publish such results. Scholars play with their findings, adding or removing data points to achieve a target level of statistical significance. The result is that we are often more confident in scholarly consensus than we should be. Chambers explains complex ideas clearly, and is passionate about the need for reform.

A Marxist critique of evolutionary biology, authored by a geneticist, a neuroscientist, and a psychologist.  From a perspective about as far from the viewpoint of creationists as it is possible to get, these three scholars argue that the philosophical assumptions, methodology, and social organization of modern biology add up to a politically conservative conspiracy reinforcing capitalism, racism, classism, and misogyny. Although their attack is general, it is most specifically aimed at intelligence testing, which, they argue, is shoddy science in the service of racist ideology.

Feyerabend argues against monism in science.

Drawing on the history of science, he demonstrates that science has progressed from pluralism. In other words, there is no the scientific method. 

Currently, mainstream economics education does not include history or philosophy in its curriculum. And economists are enthusiastically adopting a monist approach to knowledge production.

Feyerabend’s book tells us why such a naïve and narrow approach to knowledge dissemination (and production) is problematic. I feel extremely lucky to have been exposed to his work along with other philosophers of science during my master’s.

Science has revolutionized the way we live and the way we understand reality, but what accounts for its success? What method sets science apart from other forms of inquiry and ensures that it yields ever-more accurate theories of the world? Strevens argues that the scientific method is not a special kind of logic, like deriving hypotheses from first principles or narrowing hypotheses through falsification, but a simple commitment to arguing with evidence. Strevens shows, with historical case studies, how this commitment is seemingly irrational, as it provides no constraints on what counts as evidence or how evidence should be interpreted, but also incredibly powerful, fostering ingenuity and discovery.

As the attack on democracy in the West has come to include the grip of Big Pharma on public health programmes and on bodies like the World Health Organization, the covert dimensions of how this influence is being exercised have also come under scrutiny.

With a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlighting the fate of successive critics of medical misconduct, one of the most vocal of these critics and her co-author offer a shocking account of the repression they faced.

Passionate, personal, and highly revealing about the risks one takes by speaking out on the basis of facts.

The proverbial scientist at work conjures the image of a solitary investigator bent over a workbench cluttered with arcane instruments nestled among reams of scribbled notes just waiting to be transformed into creative answers to pressing questions about the natural world. The image's simplicity belies the complexity of the process it purports to represent. Adding descriptions of the what, how, and why of scientific inquiry, observation, and analysis still misses a crucial element that makes the improvement, dissemination, and acceptance of new knowledge possible, namely the active behind-the-scenes collaboration between scientists and the illustrators, photographers, printers, and other artisans who use visual representation to shape and successfully communicate that knowledge. 

Mapping the Spectrum is not just an exhaustive and illuminating history of spectrum analysis.  In it, author Klaus Hentschel brilliantly exposes the essential role of visual culture in bringing this all-important tool of modern science to useful life.  He has… show more.