Evidence for a limit to effective peer review

I missed it first time around but apparently, back in October, Nature published a somewhat-controversial article: Evidence for a limit to human lifespan. It came to my attention in a recent tweet: Just wow https://t.co/fupXIOAC43 pic.twitter.com/vsxT3VyTg6 — Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) December 11, 2016 The source: a fact-check article from Dutch news organisation NRC titled “Nature article is wrong about 115 year limit on human lifespan“. NRC seem rather interested in this research article. They have published another more recent critique of the work, titled “Statistical problems, but not enough to warrant a rejection” and a discussion of that critique, Peer review post-mortem: how a flawed aging study was published in Nature. Unfortunately, the first NRC article does itself no favours by using non-comparable x-axis scales for its charts and not really explaining very well how the different datasets (IDL and GRG) were used. Data nerds everywhere then, are wondering whether to repeat the analysis themselves and perhaps fire off a letter to Nature. My advice: don’t waste your time since Philipp Berens and Tom Wallis already did a great job, which is described here and documented (in a manner that you wish applied to Nature articles) at Github. Maximum reported age at death (n = 33) showing fitted segmented regressionThat said: I have wasted a little time and the results are in this Github repository. My code illustrates one way to obta...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Tags: publications R statistics human longevity peer review Source Type: blogs