Kevin, please go back and read my original blog post and our article. My original blog post was very careful in not accusing the author and mainly wondering if the media misinterpreted/misquoted things. In the paper, we critique the study, but also very much focus on the media’s reactions. We make no personal attacks.

Just to be clear – a reporter I spoke to thought we had run out and collected all these data in the last two weeks so it may be worth clarifying – we didn’t go out and create new projects around this study. These were data sets we had ready to go with the relevant measures and so we ran some analyses and decided to write them up to offer some evidence based on data that are better suited to answer the questions raised by the original study.

I am also very concerned that so much energy has been expended by established scholars attacking a poster session put together by a grad student. It doesn’t seem to be a very welcoming environment when so many well-established voices come down so hard on someone who never intended to enter the fray but got caught up events beyond her reckoning and experience. It’s particularly galling when so much of the published research is just as bad as this poster session but many of us have been content to keep quiet until now when we can all pile on one of our youngest and most vulnerable colleagues. The vehemence with which some of this has occurred is very off-putting and the hypocrisy is particularly troubling.

Eszter, please don’t take my comments personally; they’re not aimed at just you but at nearly everyone as this discussion has taken place in many different venues and with many different participants. You can have your soapbox back now and thank you for letting me borrow it. :)

While we can agree that much of the media got this story wrong (query: Is this happening in increasing frequency as pre-publications, conference papers, and other “not-ready-for-primetime” documents are made more widely available?) surely the discussions that followed were worthwhile, interesting, and contributed to the body of knowledge.

And with luck, the fact that the debate has moved so fast may have produced a policy response that’s more timely and appropriate than in the past, even if far from ideal.

Writing it all up formally and sending it to a peer-reviewed journal was the only condition under which I was going to continue doing any work on this though so that was part of it when I received the email from Josh asking whether I wanted to work on it together. And no, I don’t think one’s research agenda should be set in this way, but I was so frustrated by the incident that I probably would’ve wasted head space on it regardless and in that case, might as well write it all up formally then. Plus it is related to things I think about so it wasn’t completely off-topic for me.

The news cycle is now so fast that a scholarly publishing cycle of a few weeks looks luxurious by comparison. Plenty of time for rational, thorough response.