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Illustration by Laurène Boglio

Community Newsletter: Replication fail; autism diagnostic pathways

Scientists on social media this week discussed a failed attempt to replicate some functional MRI results and children’s journeys to an autism diagnosis in the United Kingdom.

Ravi Menon of Western University shared a link to his team’s preprint “No replication of direct neuronal activity-related (DIANA) fMRI in anesthetized mice,” posted on bioRxiv 29 May.

Vince Calhoun of the Mind Research Network, Jonathan Roiser of University College London, Stephen Mayhew of Aston University and Peter Bandettini of the National Institute of Mental Health responded to Menon.

Gilad Feldman of the University of Hong Kong posted a thread about a video, “Fallibility in science: Responding to errors in work of oneself and others | Dorothy Bishop,” posted on YouTube 31 May.

Dorothy Bishop of the University of Oxford replied to Feldman.

Mac Shine of the University of Sydney posted about his team’s review paper “The impact of the human thalamus on brain-wide information processing,” published 26 May in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Daniel Hermens of the University of the Sunshine Coast replied to Shine.

Tony Charman of King’s College London and the GW4 Neurodevelopmental Neurodiversity Network commented on the research article “An observational study of individual child journeys through autism diagnostic pathways, and associated costs, in the UK National Health Service,” published 25 May in Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences.

Ming Tang of Immunitas Therapeutics shared the study “SIMBA: single-cell embedding along with features,” published 29 May in Nature Methods.

Guillaume Cabanac, creator of the Problematic Paper Screener, highlighted some potentially unreliable references in the paper “Optimizing the bus operation plan based on deep learning” on PubPeer.

Elisabeth Bik of Utrecht University noted her concerns about a figure in “Blood biomarkers in autism: Autoantibodies against neuronal and glial proteins” on PubPeer.

That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! We will be taking a short break next week but will return with highlights of social media chatter on 18 June. If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you saw in the autism research sphere, feel free to send an email to [email protected].

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