The Antiplanner has long enjoyed humor magazines, such as the Journal of Irreproducible Results. But now, reports the New York Times, it turns out that many if not most scientific journals are journals of irreproducible results. Eager to be published, many scientists appear to have an “unconscious bias” and “nudge . . . the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.”
“For most study designs and settings,” says (ironically) a peer-reviewed study, “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.” The problem is so bad that Nature has a special web page with links to nearly twenty articles it has published on the subject.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. When I hear about research saying things like dogs poop facing north or south, or foxes are more likely to catch mice when pouncing in the northeast or southwest direction, I have to be skeptical. More broadly, when studies show that wine or chocolate is good for the heart or that cell phones cause brain cancer, I strongly suspect that the margins are so tiny (“people who use cell phones are 0.1 percent more likely to get brain cancer!”) as to be worthless.
