I Have Written You A Book On Forensic Metascience

Use it to cause trouble

For Valentine’s Day this year, I wanted to do something special.

So, I have written you a book.

Eventually this will be accessible through forensicmetascience.com when the new URL resolves, but for now:

You can find it at the alternate URL HERE, which is https://jamesheathers.curve.space/

Here are some questions that I have presupposed.

What is the citation?

Why would this be the first question you ask, nerd?

Heathers, J. (2025). An Introduction to Forensic Metascience. www.forensicmetascience.com. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14871843

What is it about?

It is a complete introduction to Forensic Metascience techniques. It introduces the field, and goes through a reasonably comprehensive list of observations you can make about scientific papers to ensure their consistency — some covered in a lot more detail than others!

And here’s the part that’s fun, it includes R code / functions, so you should be able to deploy the analyses yourself.

A whole book on THAT?

Yeah. I feel like when it passes 60 pages / 20,000 words it gets to be a book. That’s a book, right? It feels smug calling it a ‘monograph’. That’s just a short book for dorks.

Why?

Because I want this to be a community resource. And there’s a big community here, interested researchers, research integrity officers and committees, people doing different forms of due diligence, ethics committees, journalists, the list goes on.

And most importantly to me, there are people who want to become forensic meta-analysts. For them, in particular, this exists.

I want all these people to have definitive access to a text on forensic metascience techniques, one that is updatable, accurate, and FREE — and thus a better understanding of how to do the work. And because I’ve meant for many years to help people do this better.

What the hell is Curvenote?

curvenote.com is the future.

Curvenote allows you to publish scientific documents as a ‘Curve’ — a completely flexible, completely controllable scientific publishing platform. It has code embed, it has nice meta-data, it has its own markdown language (?!?). With the right utils, it can work like a Shiny app or a Jupyter notebook.

Publishing the text as a Curve gives me incredible flexibility, it was a good choice when I started, and it’s still a good choice now the first edition is finished.

I don’t know if this is the first ‘book’ in Curvenote? Maybe? Tell me if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter much but I’d like to know.

Ahh you said ‘first edition’ there? Future plans?

Yes, this is V1.0.

But techniques grow and change.

Even just between finishing the text and the rigmarole of publishing, I have some new stuff that should be included. And it isn’t just me out here, no doubt people will send me cooler and more sophisticated techniques, notes, observations, corrections, references, and probably inventive curses that all need to be included.

These will be versioned out over time, so the next release will be V2.0 unless there’s something urgent or egregious warranting a V1.1.

What license is it?

CC-BY-4.0