Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong

An anonymous reader writes "According to epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the majority of published scientific papers are wrong. If Ioannidis's own paper is right, a randomly chosen scientific paper has less than a 50% chance of being true. He also says that many papers may only be accurate measures of the prevailing bias among scientists. However, a senior editor of a scientific journal says that scientists are already aware of this: 'When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about.'"

Comments

This is FUD

[nigham]

From the article:

Traditionally a study is said to be "statistically significant" if the odds are only 1 in 20 that the result could be pure chance. But in a complicated field where there are many potential hypotheses to sift through - such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease - it is easy to reach false conclusions using this standard. If you test 20 false hypotheses, one of them is likely to show up as true, on average.

Odds get even worse for studies that are too small, studies that find small effects (for example, a drug that works for only 10% of patients), or studies where the protocol and endpoints are poorly defined, allowing researchers to massage their conclusions after the fact.

So this guy means that every scientific study is simply putting together some numbers from experiments? A good scientific paper - which follows the scientific method, if the author has heard of it - first presents a theory, after which it conducts experiments to estimate whether or not the theory is correct. Also, a good scientific paper will talk about limitations of accuracy - statistical limitations as the author suggests have been extremely well studied and documented.

So while it may be said that statistical studies may not always be as conclusive as they're made out to be, generalising 50% of published scientific literature to be wrong is simply Troll.