I finally got a vacation this week, which means I spent not a lot of time near a computer but had a decent amount of time to scroll through Twitter. A few good accounts I found:

• @justsaysinmice A Twitter account dedicated to Tweeting out just one phrase in response to news stories about various scientific findings: IN MICE. Amazing how often studies done in mice get an accompanying photo that shows a person, and Twitter is a great medium to showcase the photo/headline/IN MICE juxtaposition.
• @justsaysinrats Same as above, but you know, for rats
• @onlyinmen Highlights research and other scientific/health issues brought about by focusing only on men. First interesting thing I learned from this account: it’s only this year that someone made a CPR practice dummie with breasts. Since breasts make CPR more complicated, it does seem like a gap that students are never trained on a dummie that has them. Also learned: the classic Resusci Annie is called that because her face was modeled after a woman, but not the rest of her body.
• @justsaysrisks This last one is my personal favorite, as it retweets science stories with both the absolute and relative risk increase reported. So for a story like this one that says people who work long hours are a third more likely to suffer a stroke, we get “RELATIVE RISK INCREASE: 29% ABSOLUTE RISK INCREASE: 0.13%“. Great stuff.

Any other good ones I missed?

Speaking of good accounts to follow, apparently one of the first papers focused on a prominent (and anonymous) Twitter account was published, with this one on the role of Neuroskeptic in calling out scientific ethical breeches. Only paper I’ve ever seen where the conflict of interest statement included “…was banned from commenting by Leonid Schneider at his blog “forbetterscience”.

Finally, Neuroskeptic also follows up on an analysis done by Susan Fiske of who research methods blogs go after and how often.  A few years ago Fiske had caused a kerfluffle when she referred to many science/research methods bloggers as “methodological terrorists” and defended the replication crisis. Her new paper looks at 41 bloggers and categorized which other researchers they talked about most often. Interesting findings: 3 out of the top 4 talked about researchers resigned (Diederik Stapel,  Brian Wansink and Jens Förster), , and the #1 guy is pretty notorious. Other interesting note: there was no clear gender bias in who got talked about. Men were more likely to critique other men, and men who got named were posted about more often. However, it’s not particularly clear what this means about bias, as a few large cases of misconduct got a LOT of coverage, and Bem seems to have become the go to for bad methods/good researcher examples.

Still, super interesting work and good for Fiske for doing it. Gotta respect someone who gets mad, then gets data. I look forward to this being expanded on in the future.