Quality is not optional

Falsifiability is not optional.

Finkel, Eastwick, and Reis (2016; FER2016) argued the post-2011 methodological reform movement has focused narrowly on replicability, neglecting other essential goals of research. We agree multiple scientific goals are essential, but argue, however, a more fine-grained language, conceptualization, and approach to replication is needed to accomplish these goals. Replication is the general empiri...

Microbiome Datasets Are Compositional: And This Is Not Optional

Datasets collected by high-throughput sequencing (HTS) of 16S rRNA gene amplimers, metagenomes or metatranscriptomes are commonplace and being used to study human disease states, ecological differences between sites, and the built environment. There is increasing awareness that microbiome datasets generated by HTS are compositional because they have an arbitrary total imposed by the instrument....

Ethical approval in developing countries is not optional.

When conducting health and medical research it is important to do the research ethically and to apply for prior ethical approval from the relevant authorities. The latter requirement is true for developed countries as well as developing countries. The authors argue that simply applying for research ethics approval from an institutional review board at a university based in a developed country i...

Quality improvement can't be optional.

Is Engineering Ethics Optional ? Karl

than a third of a representative sample of U.S. engineering educators considered the study of differential equations to be necessary for an engineer’s education. When the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education surveyed over 500 teachers of engineering during the 1920s, it found that only 29% of the instructors believed that differential equations were of primary importance in the st...