PSY4311 – Peer reviewing and open science practices
Course description
Course content
This module covers the peer review process and current best practices in psychology and neuroscience, such as preregistration, registered reports and other open science practices. We design and preregister a study, peer review recent papers and preregistrations, and practise critical reading of the literature. The syllabus is updated each year to reflect current debates and trends, e.g. the role of placebo effects in psychedelic treatments, or the number of samples needed to reliably correlate brain measures with behaviour.?
In lectures, professors and students will discuss strengths and flaws of approaches and papers broadly related to affective neuroscience, including issues related to researcher bias and statistical power.
In seminars, students will practise i) critical reading of the literature, ii) designing and preregistering a study, iii) writing peer reviews of papers and preregistrations, iv) responding to peer reviews and improving manuscripts.
Learning outcome
The students will learn to:
- Conduct and respond to formal peer reviews
- Design and preregister a study
- Choose and evaluate open science best practices such as preregistration, open code and data, registered reports, and evaluating effect sizes
- Evaluate the explanatory value and limitations of a broad range of cognitive neuroscience approaches, such as fMRI, psychopharmacology and behavioural tasks
Admission to the course
Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.
If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.