In memoriam, Bill

Everything is different than it was at the start of 2020 – what a brutal year it is. One of its blows was the untimely death of my friend and colleague Bill Macken back in February. I just want to post/archive some of my thoughts from around that time. At…

Alessandra Souza, the 2019 WomWoM Research Fairy

By Vanessa Loaiza, Clara Overkott, and Evie Vergauwe Women of Working Memory (WomWoM) is a network of women in the working memory field who embolden each other to do their best work amongst a supportive and inclusive community. You can read about the group’s origin story and their annual Research…

#WomWom: A wand award for the 2018 research-fairy

by Alessandra Souza (@A_SSouza) and Vanessa Loaiza (@vmloaiza1)   Fairies are magical creatures, believed to have the power of words and mystical objects. They make up the content of fairy-tales, which spark the imagination and lend people to entertain a different world of ideas and possibilities. Today we want to…

I’ve got a lab handbook now

So in 2019 I can have a different New Year’s resolution than I’ve set for the last several years, because in 2018 I actually wrote my lab handbook. There are lots of great reasons to have a lab handbook. How your’s works and what you focus on will depend on…

Going for a Registered Report?

Candice C. Morey and Loukia Tzavella Registered Reports are a type of journal article in which the journal evaluates a proposal for a hypothetical research project. The Stage 1 manuscript includes an introductory literature review, details of the proposed method, and a plan for analyzing the data. Reviewers consider this…

The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, Year 1

The Peer Reviewer’s Openness (PRO) initiative is a grass-roots movement in which reviewers agitate for new standards of transparency at the journals who depend on them. I’m a signatory to this initiative and a co-author on the paper announcing it, and since 1 January 2017 I have been enforcing PRO…