Editorials in 2019

From December 2019, authors of research articles submitted to Nature Human Behaviour will have the option to publish the full peer-review records of their manuscripts, including reviewer comments, editorial decision letters and their own responses to reviewer and editorial comments.

Journals differ in how they evaluate submissions, depending on their aims and scope. Here we share how the Nature Human Behaviour editorial team evaluates research manuscripts submitted to the journal.

Publications are commonly used to evaluate PhD students’ aptitude and have the appeal of a single, ‘objective’ measure. A collection of World Views in this issue, however, suggests that this creates only an illusion of true meritocracy. Not only assessments but PhD training per se require substantive improvements to benefit science and scientists.

Science denialism causes greater harm when left unchallenged. An article in this issue provides evidence for effective rebuttal strategies.

The publication of our first two Registered Reports marks a major milestone for Nature Human Behaviour. These studies demonstrate what many researchers know, but is often hidden from the published literature: confirmatory research doesn’t always confirm the authors’ hypotheses.

Studies that focus on individual-level decision-making and barriers provide valuable insight into immigrant experiences and have the potential to inform policies and improve outcomes.

Behavioural interventions leverage knowledge from basic research to improve important aspects of life, such as healthy eating. Nature Human Behaviour is committed to working with researchers to disseminate the findings from such important intervention studies as broadly as possible.

A persistent Eurocentric bias in genomic studies means that advances in genomics research stand to benefit the few, not all. We need to change this.

We want Nature Human Behaviour to be a platform for important science, comment and opinion from around the globe. To achieve this, we need your help.

Publication bias threatens the ability of science to self-correct. It’s time to change how null or negative findings are perceived and offer incentives for their publication.

Participatory knowledge creation on platforms such as Wikipedia has revealed the enormous democratizing potential of the Internet. It has also exposed its limitations.

Understanding how humans behave, why we behave the way we do, what the consequences of our behaviour are and how behaviour can change are complex, multi-faceted questions, addressed by numerous diverse disciplines that rely on different methods and types of data. We welcome them all in the journal.