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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.'"

4 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. o the irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    /. commentors commenting on sloppy submission about sloppy analysis

    pot, meet kettle

  4. 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.