New Stanford Institute To Target Bad Science

ananyo writes "John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a "journal watch" to monitor scientific publishers' work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre's nerdishly valiant mission statement: "Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality."'"

Comments

Re:Flashback

[JustOK]

I tried to make a photocopy of it once.

Don’t throw a wet blanket on science

[Theovon]

It’s wrong to publish fabricated or falsified results, and people who do that should be slammed. There are other situations where people are being neglegent or hoping you don’t catch their slight of hand. For instance, there are the innumerable parallel computing papers that use O(N^2) algorithms to show a speedup on a GPU or supercomputer where there exists a serial O(log N) algorithm that runs faster on a PC. (No joke.) All of those sorts of things should be actively retracted.

However, what we don’t want to do is discourage publication of preliminary results that MIGHT be wrong. Honest, legitimate work that gets superceded should not be subject to retraction, and a wrong theory published can often inspire others to do a better job. When a researcher can say, “That was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,” then it should stand as a legitimate publication. Relativity and quantum mechanics supercede Newtonian physics, but that doesn’t mean we should retract everything Newton said.

Now, most people reading this will say “duh!” Because that’s obvious. All I’m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher. That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.