A couple of months ago, someone told me to read the paper Science of science, published in Science last year. I enjoyed reading the paper. Despite its authors insisting upon the novelty of the field, I had a hard time grasping what was actually novel, except that data was bigger and comoputational models possibly deeper. Little did I know that a good part of the 14 headed team of authors would be attending a conference just across the street from my office this week. The title of the conference surely caught my eye: Metascience 2019: The Emerging Field of Research on the Scientific Process. I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and these are my thaughts and remarks after three days.

No more p-values. Steven Goodman was relentless with his message - let’s get rid of p-values once and for all! Well maybe not all of them, at least not immediately. But we need to move towards a quantification of confidence, and the Bayesian paradigm is a reasonable way forward.

Some cool tools were shared. My favorite must be scite.ai, a website where you type a DOI, a title or an author name to find whether how citations of that source that are mere mentions, how many are supportive and how many that contradict it. And this is of course based on machine learning. Another one was the R package statcheck (also with web application: statcheck.io) that searches through manuscripts for statistical errors in reporting as long as they are reported in APA style.

Is metascience an autonomous field of research? Not yet. Based on this conference, the kinds of questions they are exploring are still the turf of other fields. At the moment, it is primarily the science of replicability and reproducibility of research.

Maybe metascience and it’s older siblings history of, philosophy of, sociology of, anthropology of science and science and technology studies could reconcile in my favorite reconciliatory device for struggles in science: practical versus theoretical. Metascience and parts of philosophy of science is mostly concerned with the oughts of the scientific making of knowledge whereas history, sociology, anthropology and STS deals with how scientific knowledge is actually made.