Editorials in 2023

Fewer than one in ten research articles are posted as preprints. Yet sharing research on public repositories comes with many advantages and few caveats. At Nature Human Behaviour, we encourage researchers to embrace preprints to jumpstart the communication of research findings.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) was already ubiquitous, the recent arrival of generative AI has ushered in a new era of possibilities as well as risks. This Focus explores the wide-ranging impacts of AI tools on science and society, examining both their potential and their pitfalls.

We spend a lot of time on the manuscripts we publish, from pre-review evaluation and finding reviewers to post-review decisions and revision evaluations. However, we reserve the closest level of scrutiny for manuscripts that have successfully passed the peer review process and are in preparation for acceptance.

Science is international, but scientific publishing is dominated by English-language publications. This disproportionately benefits native or fluent English speakers. We want to take steps to address the imbalance this creates, and new technology may help.

On 5 May, the World Health Organization lifted its designation of COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern. The abatement of the pandemic represents an extraordinary scientific achievement. However, COVID-19 remains a threat and its effects will continue to be felt for years.

We are updating our guidance on how to write titles and abstracts for papers in Nature Human Behaviour to ensure that readers are provided with more information about the scope and strength of evidence presented.

The majority of empirical articles that we publish use null-hypothesis significance testing. In most cases, researchers rely on P values to establish the scientific or practical significance of their findings. However, statistical significance alone provides very little information that is useful for making inferences about scientific or policy significance. For this reason, we require authors to provide much more information than just P values — in this Editorial, we explain our requirements.

The freedom to research and publish without fear of state retribution is one that many academics take as a given. Unfortunately, this basic freedom is not universal.