Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Can automated tools help researchers catch problems before their work is published?
In this talk from the King’s Open Research Summer School 2026, Professor Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology) introduces metacheck, an open-source toolkit designed to automatically screen scientific manuscripts and research outputs for potential issues and opportunities for improvement.
Inspired by automated quality-control checks in software development, metacheck can help researchers identify issues such as incorrect citations, missing DOIs, references to retracted or questioned papers, and commonly misreported methodological and statistical practices.
Importantly, metacheck is designed to support rather than replace human expertise. It does not automatically score or judge the quality of research. Instead, it highlights areas that researchers may want to investigate, with interpretation and decision-making remaining with the researcher.
The talk demonstrates how automated checks could become part of routine research workflows, helping researchers identify errors earlier and strengthen the transparency, reproducibility, and credibility of scientific research.
This presentation was recorded as part of the King’s Open Research Summer School 2026, hosted by King’s College London.
A huge thank you to Daniël for contributing to the Summer School and for allowing us to share his talk more widely.
#OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #Metascience #Reproducibility #OpenResearch #ResearchMethods #Metacheck #AcademicResearch
Can automated tools help researchers catch problems before their work is published?
In this talk from the King’s Open Research Summer School 2026, Professor Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology) introduces metacheck, an open-source toolkit designed to automatically screen scientific manuscripts and research outputs for potential issues and opportunities for improvement.
Inspired by automated quality-control checks in software development, metacheck can help researchers identify issues such as incorrect citations, missing DOIs, references to retracted or questioned papers, and commonly misreported methodological and statistical practices.
Importantly, metacheck is designed to support rather than replace human expertise. It does not automatically score or judge the quality of research. Instead, it highlights areas that researchers may want to investigate, with interpretation and decision-making remaining with the researcher.
The talk demonstrates how automated checks could become part of routine research workflows, helping researchers identify errors earlier and strengthen the transparency, reproducibility, and credibility of scientific research.
This presentation was recorded as part of the King’s Open Research Summer School 2026, hosted by King’s College London.
A huge thank you to Daniël for contributing to the Summer School and for allowing us to share his talk more widely.
#OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #Metascience #Reproducibility #OpenResearch #ResearchMethods #Metacheck #AcademicResearch
