An open letter to PNAS about their publication of the Facebook study
(I submitted the letter below to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was not published on the basis that they don’t publish letters alleging misconduct, but I’m actually not trying to allege here that the study authors necessarily did anything wrong in conducting the experiment – I’m suggesting that the journal made the wrong decision in choosing to publish the article based on what we, the readers, could see of it. We simply can’t tell whether this research met scientific standards for ethics and editors, reviewers, and readers should be given enough information to make that determination in cases where there may be doubt.)
