Swans on Tea

Odds Are, it’s Wrong

They seem to be looking specifically at medical (and related) research; I don’t know if there is a greater prevalence of an underlying problem — not publishing null results — in those fields as compared to elsewhere.

Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”