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Sciborg_S_Patel
Just going to paste some articles I've read in this thread:
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
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Bad Science Muckrakers Question the Big Science Status Quo
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2014: Let the Light Shine In: Two big recent scientific results are looking shaky—and it is open peer review on the internet that has been doing the shaking
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 when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
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Bad Science Muckrakers Question the Big Science Status Quo
To make matters worse, private research dollars are being choked off by ill-conceived regulations, making researchers even more dependent on government grants, as Dr. Thomas Stossel at Harvard Medical School points out.
Stossel calls overly restrictive conflict of interest regulations “a damaging solution in search of a problem.” A self-described “typical academic socialist, totally living on grants for the first third of my career,” Stossel says his eyes were opened in 1987, when he was asked to serve on the scientific advisory board of Biogen (now Biogen IDEC), a fledgling biotech startup that went on to become a tremendous success. “I realized how fundamentally honest business people are compared to my academic colleagues, who’d run their grandmothers over for recognition.”
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2014: Let the Light Shine In: Two big recent scientific results are looking shaky—and it is open peer review on the internet that has been doing the shaking
SCIENTISTS make much of the fact that their work is scrutinised anonymously by some of their peers before it is published. This “peer review” is supposed to spot mistakes and thus keep the whole process honest. The peers in question, though, are necessarily few in number, are busy with their own work, are expected to act unpaid—and are often the rivals of those whose work they are scrutinising. And so, by a mixture of deliberation and technological pressure, the system is starting to change. The internet means anyone can appoint himself a peer and criticise work that has entered the public domain. And two recent incidents have shown how valuable this can be.
The second claim came from cosmology. On March 17th researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led by John Kovac, held a press conference at which they announced that they had discovered interesting patterns in the cosmic microwave background, a type of weak radiation left over from the universe’s earliest moments. They said they had spotted the signatures of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space formed just after the Big Bang.
Once again, it was big news (including in The Economist). The existence of such waves would give strong support for the theory of inflation, which holds that the early universe underwent a brief burst of faster-than-light expansion. Inflation was put forward in the 1980s by theorists as a way to resolve various knotty problems with the standard theory of the Big Bang. But although it is widely assumed to be true, direct evidence that it happened had been lacking.
Dr Kovac and his colleagues made much of their data available online at the time, prompting hundreds of physicists to check their work. Doubts soon surfaced. The team’s claim to have spotted the waves relies on them having diligently scrubbed out every possible source of false positives. But doing that is hard, because the most likely culprit—interstellar dust—is poorly understood. Such diligence is made doubly difficult by the fact that, although several teams are hunting for primordial gravity waves, the glory of being the first to spot them means none is willing to share its data with the others.
The various online arguments culminated with the publication of an online paper by researchers from New York University, Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study (also in Princeton). This concluded that Dr Kovac’s data, which came from an Antarctic telescope called BICEP-2, may well have been contaminated by space dust, and that the purported gravitational waves may be much weaker than the team first claimed—if they exist at all.