Tijn van Hoesel

Tijn van Hoesel

Methodology and Statistics
Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tilburg University

Email
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Project
Spin: Questionable Research Practices in Scientific Reporting

The focus of this PhD project is on spin. Spin can be defined as “reporting practices that cause a discordance between results and their interpretation, possibly leading to misleading conclusions by readers” (van Hoesel & Bakker, 2024) and is a concept that has primarily gotten attention in the field of biomedicine. Spin can be found in all parts of an academic paper, however most research focusses on spin in abstracts. Varying results have been reported on the prevalence of spin in abstracts ranging from 10% to 84% (Chiu et al., 2017; Shinohara, Suganuma, et al., 2017; Stoll et al., 2020). Some studies have investigated the effects of spin on the interpretation of the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) presented in abstracts (Boutron et al., 2014; Jankowski et al., 2022; Shinohara, Aoki, et al., 2017) and have found that abstracts that contain spin can increase the perceived effectiveness of a treatment evaluated in the RCT. Furthermore, it has been found that those who read the abstract with spin, compared to those who read the abstract without spin, were more interested in reading to full-text article and in extending the line of research for the treatment evaluated in the study.

Since spin is mainly investigated in the field of biomedicine, the focus of most studies has been on RCTs. The goal of the current PhD project is to extend spin research into the field of psychology. To this purpose, we will investigate (among other things) how spin manifests in other types of studies (e.g., observational studies) that are more common in psychology and how the concept of spin overlaps with the already more extensively investigated concept of questionable research practices (QRPs).

The first project of this PhD trajectory has already been completed and it made a first step towards extending spin research into the field of psychology. In that project, we investigated how spin in abstracts of studies investigating behavioral treatments for depression impact the interpretation of the findings in those studies.

This PhD project fits within the IOPS since it aims to positively impact the quality of psychological (and other social science) research by mapping and tackling issues regarding scientific reporting. More specifically, the project aims to develop methods for detecting spin in (observational) studies within psychology, possibly by making use of large language models and/or natural language processing techniques.

Supervisors
Dr. Marjan Bakker
Dr. Bennett Kleinberg

Financed by
Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University

Period
1 September 2024 – 31 August 2030 (50/50, PhD/Junior Lecturer)