Why published research is untrustworthy

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true whe...

Essay Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

There is increasing concern that most current published research fi ndings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientifi c field. In this framework, a research fi nding is less likely to be true ...

Summary and discussion of : “ Why Most Published Research

Recently, there has been a great deal of attention given to a perceived “replication crisis” in science, both in the popular press (Freedman 2010, “Trouble at the lab” 2013, Chambers 2014), and in top-tier scientific journals (Ioannidis 2005a, Ioannidis 2005b, Schooler 2014). To a certain extent, science is understood to be an accumulative, iterative, self-correcting endeavour, where mistakes a...

Is most published research really false?

There has been an increasing concern that most published medical findings are false. But what does it mean to be false? Here we describe the range of definitions of false discoveries in the scientific literature. We summarize the philosophical, statistical, and experimental evidence for each type of false discovery. We discuss common underpinning problems with the scientific and data analytic p...

Why is research fraud wrong?