Three months into 2026 and time to try to review where I am with my non-CORE work. As ever with me, this is a mix of looking back, looking further back and looking forward. I am slowly moving forward and trying to achieve more work outside the dominant grant funded and peer-review publication driven research world in our field.
Short view back: so far in 2026!
No peer-reviewed papers out. I can plead it’s been a tough six months personally and if anyone is interested in that have a look at my three posts in my personal site covering that: here, here and here. Having said that, Clara and I have a couple of OK papers out in review stages and we two more that I’ll be very proud of if they do get published. However, in my last post here, my review of 2025, I said:
“One reason I am a bit vague about my paper output is that I’ve become increasingly conscious of the problems of the 21st Century research/academic world being so organised around peer-reviewed journal publication and I’ve been trying to give more of my time and energy to creating other resources …“
And that remains true. I’m increasingly convinced that this research world, as it impinges on psychosocial interventions, is not how we should be working and is structured to keep moving away from what we need. I hope to be arguing more of that in the second half of 2026 with luck, but for now I’ll just summarise where I am getting to with the things I am trying to do that are outside that peer-reviewed publication driven world: the glossary to the “OMbook” that Jo-anne and got out in 2023, my “Rblog“, my shiny apps and, for the geeks, my R package: CECPfuns.
I’ve added nothing to the CECPfuns package in 2026, however the glossary has 22 new entries taking it to 437. The Rblog is only up by another one entry about weighted kappa (there’s another that seems to be broken and I haven’t had time to debug that!). I have only added one shiny app so far this year. That gives you a forest plot of rates if you give it your data. Here’s a small example.
I did also radically improve the page that analyses the shiny app usage stats giving it a nice interactive table which is also quite a good way to see what apps are there.
Longer view back (1998)
Some time this year I noticed that back in 1998 I had added this to a forerunner of my shiny apps.
“Final caveat
Always remember that measures only measure part of the human condition and don’t always do that well. Such methods should always be used in parallel with other ways of reviewing clinical work.“
I like that: short, important and to the point! It also touches one of the ways that I think our research world, at least in the global north, has lost its way. When I scan the journals, the Society for Psychotherapy Research conference presentations and the alerts that I get of new papers out from some of the leading researchers that I still follow I am sure we have lost our way. One issue, but not the main one, is that it is all so quantitative. My main research skills are quantitative so why am I criticising this? Because of that caution above that I felt the need to write nearly 30 years ago. We need quantitative research but it needs to be self-critical, to discuss its findings with some humility and more than just tokenistic reviews of the limitations. That’s not what I am seeing. I hope to be doing more, including in peer-reviewed papers, and in my other resources, to articulate these issues.
Looking forward: Q3 and Q4 of 2026
So that takes me nicely to looking forward: to where I hope to be working in the second half of this year. The eagle eyed among you will immediately ask “what about Q2?!” … well I hope to be moving house, switching my “semigration” base in France from up in the Alps to the Charente (I hope). If all the formalities and legalities go to plan that should happen in May and I am telling myself that if I put most of my energies in Q2 into relocating and reorienting myself then I will achieve more beyond that. Fingers crossed!