Current science; fraudulent thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, December 13, 2015, 23:30 (3058 days ago) @ David Turell

There is hope. Here is an essay asking for replication:-https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/how-do-we-fix-bad-science-"Ten years ago epidemiologist John Ioannidis blew the whistle on science. -"His paper: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, was published in August 2005, in PLOS Medicine. It became one of the journal's most-cited articles. While climate sceptics, anti-vaccination campaigners and the rest of the pseudo-science community have dined out on this paper, arguably it has been a shot in the arm for science. -"Ioannidis (then at the University of Ioannina, Greece, now at Stanford University, California) argued the inherent bias of researchers made them too flexible with their study design. Sample sizes were too small to be meaningful, say; or if the initial data didn't yield dramatic results, they re-analysed them until they got “better numbers”. In some cases, data that did not conform was eliminated (called “cleaning the data”). The tendencies were more pronounced if financial or ideological interests were at stake. -***-"A career in academic research is wildly competitive. University scientists have to raise grant money constantly, and to do so, you have to tell the funding agency that you think your project will work based on your past results. Only innovative work is funded. The rewards for success are huge: your salary depends on it. -***-"They began with psychology, selecting 100 experiments that had been published in peer-reviewed journals and 270 expert scientists to repeat them. To ensure they were doing the experiments correctly, they asked the original authors to participate. The findings were published on August 2015 in Science - 10 years after Ioannidis's first paper. They found more than 60% of the experiments did not reproduce the original results. Even in the successfully replicated studies, the effect was about half that of the original studies.-"The good news is that this seems to be the beginning of a new wave of making science accountable. Nosek says major psychology journals have started publishing replications alongside original research. A reproducibility project for cancer research is next."-Comment: Government-science complex. Too many people chasing too little money. I hope what I decide to present is reliable. At least we are not looking at survey material, but descriptive discoveries.