Res Integr Peer Rev
April 2025
Background: Research on research integrity (RI) has grown exponentially over the past several decades. Although the earliest publications emerged in the 1980 s, more than half of the existing literature has been produced within the last five years. Given that the most recent comprehensive literature review is now eight years old, the present study aims to extend and update previous findings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent work in the field of consciousness science has predominantly focused on the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). However, despite significant technological advances in recent decades, defining NCC remains an ambitious goal in consciousness research. The main difficulty stems from an epistemological challenge known as the "Problem of coordination", which hinders or at least slows down the experimental process inherent to the study of consciousness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat is mood? Despite its crucial place in psychiatric nosography and cognitive science, it is still difficult to delimit its conceptual ground. The distinction between emotion and mood is ambiguous: mood is often presented as an affective state that is more prolonged and less intense than emotion, or as an affective polarity distinguishing high and low mood swinging around a baseline. However, these definitions do not match the clinical reality of mood disorders such as unipolar depression and bipolar disorder, and do not allow us to understand the effect of mood on behaviour, perception and cognition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Therapeutic research into Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been dominated by the amyloid cascade hypothesis (ACH) since the 1990s. However, targeting amyloid in AD patients has not yet resulted in highly significant disease-modifying effects. Furthermore, other promising theories of AD etiology exist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe amyloid cascade hypothesis (ACH) has dominated contemporary biomedical research into Alzheimer's disease (AD) since the 1990 s but still lacks definitive confirmation by successful clinical trials of anti-amyloid medicines in human AD. In this uncertain period regarding the centrality of amyloid-β (Aβ) in AD pathophysiology, and with the community apparently divided about the ACH's validity, we used citation practices as a proxy for measuring how researchers have invested their belief in the hypothesis between 1992 and 2019. We sampled 445 articles citing Hardy & Higgins (1992, "HH92") and classified the polarity of their HH92 citation according to Greenberg (2009)'s citation taxonomy of positive, neutral, and negative citations, and then tested four hypotheses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe conference 'The Many Faces of Epigenetics: Multidisciplinary Perspectives "over" Genetics' was held in Oxford (6-8 December 2017) and offered a valuable window into the domain of Epigenetics and its promises. The workshop revealed that, among a wealth of discourses about Epigenetics, it is not so easy to decipher which discourses are to be trusted. Because Epigenetics is a rather old notion that has generated many debates and promises, defining precisely what has changed and where we are currently is a challenge in itself.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmpirical agreement is often used as an important criterion when assessing the validity of scientific models. However, it is by no means a sufficient criterion as a model can be so adjusted as to fit available data even though it is based on hypotheses whose plausibility is known to be questionable. Our aim in this paper is to investigate into the uses of empirical agreement within the process of model validation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFControversy regarding the species problem has been going on for many decades and no consensus has ever been reached about what a "species" really is and how best to define the concept. De Queiroz (1998) introduced a distinction between two aspects of this problem: on the one hand, the definition proper, and on the other, the criteria allowing biologists to recognize species in practice. This distinction is a first step on the way toward a solution of the problem.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF