Dispersing the Impermeable Fog: #3 – declining an invitation to review a pseudo-scientific paper

The Coexistence Approach is a pseudo-science. At least, it's fundamentally flawed in theory and practise. But one journal remains the bastion of true faith. But maybe tides are changing?

Bentham wants me as reviewer ... for medicinal chemistry

BSP pretends to be a proper scientific publisher, and not a predatory one. So, why sending an invitation to become a reviewer of some medicinal journal to a former scientist (see counter on my homepage) that dealt in phylogenetics and palaeobotany?

Trivial but illogical – reconstructing the biogeographic history of the Loranthaceae (again)

In 2007, a short but nice paper by Vidal-Russell & Nickrent provided a scenario for the unfolding of the Loranthaceae, a plant family of mostly epiphytic tree parasites. Recently, they teamed up with a Chinese group (Liu, Le et al. 2018) to provide a new, and totally unexpected hypothesis.

Elsevier's research data "not available/will be made available on request" – what will be your choice?

What do you do when authors claim something (showing nothing) that you know can't be true (because you showed otherwise)? Just request the data they used and re-analyse it to check. But this is not how it works. An example from Elsevier's Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution.

What you should show in a palaeophylogenetic study

Far the most palaeophylogenetic studies rely exclusively on tree-inference as methodological framework. Thus, ignoring the fundamental properties over the underlying data: matrices that provide few tree-like signals. A recommendation what to show (and why).