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Policy concerning reviewing articles one has contributed to
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Right now the current rule is that one cannot review one's own articles. Interpreted the obvious way, this means that one cannot review articles when one is one of the authors of it.

However, in other cases it is less clear. In the case of my paper here, Piffer fetched the data for me since I don't speak Italian. He did no further analysis of it however. He is also a reviewer of the paper. Problem?

In another case, Meng Hu has contributed to making the appendix, edited datafiles, made tables, but apparently not written anything, taken part of the design planning or conducted the original analyses. Problem?

It is not immediately clear where to draw the boundary in practice.

What does the reviewers think?
Just to be sure, for this study here I have made a little bit more than this. Since John did not show the standard errors and i find them useful, and since I was looking at the NCES IDE and try to see if he gets the numbers right, I was thinking it's the good opportunity to add them (the NCES always displays standard errors). I have also made the analysis for NLSY97 by race by "generation" or more precisely, by number of grandparents who are born in the US. It's a replication of this blog post. But I should not be credited for this one. It is true that I made the suggestion to include it in the spreadsheet, although John may have decided not to talk about it in the paper (check the section "Additional studies and Estimates (NOT INCLUDED in the meta-analysis)"). Nonetheless, the syntax has been made by John, and at that time, I have merely reported those numbers.

However, I have made the analysis for TIMSS 1995, 2003, as well as PIRLS 2001. I have also added the numbers for PISA 2012, and other years he has not considered, because i did not know why he hasn't included them (he said he wanted to focus on some particular years, those not to remote in time, if I remember correctly). That's why I did it. However, when I added the data for the other years not considered in his meta-analysis, I told him he will do what he wants with them. I'm not the author, and he should be the one to decide what to do with them.
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In Denmark there was a controversy recently concerning Helmuth Nyborg, our eminent psychometrician. He was accused and found guilty of scientific misconduct on two counts. The first was that he had forgotten to add a note about a data transformation (crude birth rate to total fertility) in his paper. Slight mistake, no big deal. The second was that he had hidden a co-author. The story is that he bought data from a Danish economist who had developed a method of estimating the number of immigrants in Denmark better than the official stats agency does. The other guy did not want to be a co-author of the paper and his involvement ended with his contribution of the methodology (a huge spreadsheet). Nyborg then published the paper without mentioning the other guy which apparently was scientific misconduct.

In his defense, Nyborg referred to the Vancouver standard, which is as follows:

The Vancouver Protocol states that in order to be credited as an author, each and every author on a publication needs to have been involved in the:

1. Conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data
AND
2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published.

Apparently, they (some official body) didn't care about those guidelines.

Since his purported co-author did not meet 2 and 3, he did not qualify. (More is to come in the Nyborg-case, but I can't reveal it yet.) If we go by the same rules, then Meng Hu does not quality either, which by the usual rules makes him eligible as a reviewer.

We can of course stipulate stronger rules for review. Thoughts?
Thanks. I have heard of problems with Nyborg but did not know the details. So yes, I confirm I have only been involved in 1). No more.
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