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Most Science Studies Tainted by Sloppy Analysis

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the devil-is-in-the-details dept.

mlimber writes "The Wall Street Journal has a sobering piece describing the research of medical scholar John Ioannidis, who showed that in many peer-reviewed research papers 'most published research findings are wrong.' The article continues: 'These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. [...] To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.'"

14 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Oh yea baby... by Pojut · · Score: 2, Funny

    They can study my taint anytime they want. /Karma

    --
    Living With a Nerd
  2. Here it comes... by Penguinisto · · Score: 3, Funny
    Insert politically charged science topics, point to 'em as examples, and launch into a stupid flamefest over it all in 3... 2... 1...

    /P

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    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  3. Re:How is this news? by Leftist+Troll · · Score: 5, Funny

    How can we even trust this study?

    After all, studies show that most studies are wrong.

  4. What About this Study? by sarahbau · · Score: 5, Funny

    How do we know the study that shows that most studies are tainted isn't tainted?

  5. According to my research by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Funny

    According to my research, most studies involve about 84% error rate due to flawed statistical analysis caused by people pulling statistics out of their arse. The other 16% are flawed due to NOT actually pulling statistics out of their arse.

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    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  6. Slashdot taints article study finds by packetmon · · Score: 3, Funny

    The secret is out! Investigators are looking into whether or not millions of scientists have been using modified versions of SCIgen for their work. The FBI and Department of Termpaper Security have acknowledged the investigation but declined to speculate on the alleged ties between SCIgen and grammar terrorists citing a new law just passed by pResident Bush which allows warrantless underwear tapping.

    Authorities are also investigating the connections between Malda, Bush Laden, Bill Gates, Dvorak and Borat SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

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    Infiltrated dot Net
  7. o the irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    /. commentors commenting on sloppy submission about sloppy analysis

    pot, meet kettle

  8. Double checked by Edward+Ka-Spel · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just read the article and checked his statistics. He did his numbers wrong.

  9. Re:How is this news? by mh1997 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "We all know..." What are you basing this on??? As a postdoc, I've committed myself to a massive amount of work and I'm certainly not doing it for pay (which is meager), but a LITTLE amount of respect would be nice. I've published a few studies and it was incredibly hard work to do the kind of careful science that gets published. A small amount of scandals and people like you who swallow any sensationalist piece of news out there really cast things in an unfair light. I encourage you to read more scientific literature and actually try and understand how the scientific process works. Do you really think we live in the kind of technological age as we do in spite of "a good portion of all studies" being "bogus" or "based on nothing"? I find this incredibly insulting.
    It's a well known fact that 42% of all statistics are made up, and that over 70% of studies use these false statistics. Therefore, 89% of all studies are flawed.

    You'd think a postdoc would have known this.

  10. Re:How is this news? by Garridan · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, of course you can trust it, since somebody can verify this independantly. ;)

  11. yeah but... by Kelexel · · Score: 2, Funny

    [Speaking to self...]
    A scientific study published that most scientific studies are wrong... therefore there is a good change of it being wrong.... Which means that most scientific studies are right... But if most studies are right then this one is also right... which means...
    c.. an.. t take .... this...
    [Head explodes]

  12. I'm sorry by Sloppy · · Score: 2, Funny

    I won't analyze again.

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  13. Summary by slapout · · Score: 2, Funny
    So, to sum it up for the Slashdot audience:

    • Global warming isn't happening
    • Pluto IS a planet
      and
    • Han shot first
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  14. Re:So you lied about reading the articles? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Funny

    So stop being such a pompous asshole, you are dumber than you realize.

    Pot meet kettle.
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