News & Comment

Cases of scientific misconduct can have a massive impact on scholars (especially junior scholars), and repercussions may last years. They need support, writes Marret K. Noordewier.

The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’) as president of Brazil on 30 October 2022 marked the end of the populist Bolsonaro era. In this Feature, five Brazilian scientists discuss their hopes and expectations for the new presidency and its scientific policies.

The African Union has committed to gender equity for the continent. Yet women are underrepresented in education, in the workplace and in leadership positions. We must act now to achieve gender equity and combat existing structures of discrimination. We propose actions to help women to get there, stay there and thrive as leaders.

Ongoing strike action has hit UK universities in recent months. Undergraduate student Kelsey Trevett explains why they are fully supportive of their striking lecturers.

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.

There is a global geographical divide in mental health that exacerbates the mental health crisis. Equitable involvement of young people can help, writes Manvi Tiwari.

Protests calling for ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in Iran have been met with government crackdowns, affecting universities across the country. In response, Iranian academics abroad have formed the International Community of Iranian Academics. Founding member Encieh Erfani talks to Nature Human Behaviour about their work.

At Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, President Erdoğan’s policies and appointments are overturning the long-held liberal values of the institution. In an ongoing struggle of resistance against these actions, the faculty protest daily in the name of academic freedom and university autonomy.

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.

An analysis of 2,500 public-health claims reveals that organizations rarely communicate uncertainties around the benefits of behavioural change. To be ethical, public-health communication should be accurate and transparent.

‘Big team’ science challenges researchers to revisit three issues around authorship: (1) how to define authorship-worthy contributions, (2) how contributions should be documented and (3) how disagreements among large teams of coauthors should be handled. We propose steps that the community can take to resolve these issues.

The ‘makeshift medicine’ framework describes how individuals address healthcare needs when they are unable to access the US healthcare system. The framework is applied to gender-affirming care, the health of people who inject drugs and abortion access. Recommendations for future research, advocacy and policy are made.