Most scientific papers are probably wrong

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Yeah here comes a cut and paste

Most scientific papers are probably wrong
02:00 30 August 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Kurt Kleiner
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.

"We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery," Ioannidis says.

In the paper, Ioannidis does not show that any particular findings are false. Instead, he shows statistically how the many obstacles to getting research findings right combine to make most published research wrong.

Massaged conclusions
Traditionally a study is said to be "statistically significant" if the odds are only 1 in 20 that the result could be pure chance. But in a complicated field where there are many potential hypotheses to sift through - such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease - it is easy to reach false conclusions using this standard. If you test 20 false hypotheses, one of them is likely to show up as true, on average.

Odds get even worse for studies that are too small, studies that find small effects (for example, a drug that works for only 10% of patients), or studies where the protocol and endpoints are poorly defined, allowing researchers to massage their conclusions after the fact.

Surprisingly, Ioannidis says another predictor of false findings is if a field is "hot", with many teams feeling pressure to beat the others to statistically significant findings.

But Solomon Snyder, senior editor at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, US, says most working scientists understand the limitations of published research.

"When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about," he says.

Journal reference: Public Library of Science Medicine (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

Yet how many times are these papers quoted here on things like global warming and how much oil we have left? Like they really know whats going on.

LINK

[Gawain of Orkeny]

No offense Gawain, but this is just ridiculous. Even for you.

And just what is that supposed to mean? Its the truth.

[Silver Rusher]

But under their logic, they could be wrong too. It's a semi-paradox. I agree about the oil and global warming though.

[Adrian II]

And just what is that supposed to mean? Its the truth.

No, it is just another paper...

[discovery1]

This is why science is a peer review thing. Everybody checks everone elses work. Has global warming stood up to peer review (which I won't answer) what you should be talking about GoO, not that papers are usually wrong.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

But under their logic, they could be wrong too

Thats why they title it PROBABLY wrong

But if you go back in time the majority of scientific papers have been refuted as we gain new knowledege. Whats right today is wrong tommorow.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

This is why science is a peer review thing. Everybody checks everone elses work. Has global warming stood up to peer review (which I won't answer) what you should be talking about GoO, not that papers are usually wrong.

Did the fact that the earth was flat stand up to peer review? It sure did.

[Paul Peru]

Well, it's quite a brain-teaser.
As mentioned in the article and by SR, they could be wrong.
And the way in which the papers are shown to be wrong is that they are refuted by subsequent scientific studies, a large portion of which can be presumed to be wrong.
No wonder people pick religion, it's always right even after it's proven to be wrong. Science, huh!

[discovery1]

I believe only the uneducated thought that the earth was round for a very long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth

Read it. Sounds like the acients thought the world round, and by 1200 the idea was again widely acknoledged.

And has it?

[Red Harvest]

This is funny watching various reactions. The basic thread title is correct. A great many early studies/papers etc. do turn out to be wrong. By it's nature, science is testing new ideas. And the papers rely on probability tests anyway to draw conclusions. Nobody expects a high percentage hit when testing new ideas.

The significant part is in follow up work and eventual conclusions. The original data sets are often found to be in error due to confounding variables that were unknown (or unaccounted for).

As is also noted, some researchers are anything but thorough and/or objective. That is the nature of man.

However, with science, over time the inaccurate studies/conclusions are eventually dismissed or revised. Many papers I've read through were junk, usually I can tell, but sometimes it is not obvious until later when I try to apply the conclusions.

Science isn't like religion. The "truth" isn't declared and then left untested. But science advances over time, very rapidly over the past few centuries. Truths are learned by lots of perspiration. Some so called "laws" are later disproven or at least shown to apply to a more limited frame.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Yeah here comes a cut and paste

Well here is another cut and paste.

Republicans accused of witch-hunt against climate change scientists

Some of America's leading scientists have accused Republican politicians of intimidating climate-change experts by placing them under unprecedented scrutiny.
A far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three of the US's most senior climate specialists has been launched by Joe Barton, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce. He has demanded details of all their sources of funding, methods and everything they have ever published.

Mr Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat climate change.

He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairman of the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.
The scientific work they are investigating was important in establishing that man-made carbon emissions were at least partly responsible for global warming, and formed part of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convinced most world leaders - George Bush was a notable exception - that urgent action was needed to curb greenhouse gases.

The demands in letters sent to the scientists have been compared by some US media commentators to the anti-communist "witch-hunts" pursued by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

The three US climate scientists - Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University; Raymond Bradley, the director of the Climate System Research Centre at the University of Massachusetts; and Malcolm Hughes, the former director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona - have been told to send large volumes of material.

A letter demanding information on the three and their work has also gone to Arden Bement, the director of the US National Science Foundation.

Mr Barton's inquiry was launched after an article in the Wall Street Journal quoted an economist and a statistician, neither of them from a climate science background, saying there were methodological flaws and data errors in the three scientists' calculations. It accused the trio of refusing to make their original material available to be cross-checked.

Mr Barton then asked for everything the scientists had ever published and all baseline data. He said the information was necessary because Congress was going to make policy decisions drawing on their work, and his committee needed to check its validity.

There followed a demand for details of everything they had done since their careers began, funding received and procedures for data disclosure.

The inquiry has sent shockwaves through the US scientific establishment, already under pressure from the Bush administration, which links funding to policy objectives.

Eighteen of the country's most influential scientists from Princeton and Harvard have written to Mr Barton and Mr Whitfield expressing "deep concern". Their letter says much of the information requested is unrelated to climate science.

It says: "Requests to provide all working materials related to hundreds of publications stretching back decades can be seen as intimidation - intentional or not - and thereby risks compromising the independence of scientific opinion that is vital to the pre-eminence of American science as well as to the flow of objective science to the government."

Alan Leshner protested on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, expressing "deep concern" about the inquiry, which appeared to be "a search for a basis to discredit the particular scientists rather than a search for understanding".

Political reaction has been stronger. Henry Waxman, a senior Californian Democrat, wrote complaining that this was a "dubious" inquiry which many viewed as a "transparent effort to bully and harass climate-change experts who have reached conclusions with which you disagree".

But the strongest language came from another Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the house science committee. He wrote to "express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation".

He said it was pernicious to substitute political review for scientific peer review and the precedent was "truly chilling". He said the inquiry "seeks to erase the line between science and politics" and should be reconsidered.
A spokeswoman for Mr Barton said yesterday that all the required written evidence had been collected.

"The committee will review everything we have and decided how best to proceed. No decision has yet been made whether to have public hearings to investigate the validity of the scientists' findings, but that could be the next step for this autumn," she said.

The Guardian

Edit:
Sorry, the relevance of the above is to reveal the political agenda behind the attack on science by American conservatives.

[Red Harvest]

Well here is another cut and paste.
The Guardian

Edit:
Sorry, the relevance of the above is to reveal the political agenda behind the attack on science by American conservatives.

There is a fairly strong anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-education core to the conservatives. This administration throughout has used a scorched earth policy against anyone presenting information opposing their views, objective or not.

[Adrian II]

Republicans accused of witch-hunt against climate change scientists

I have been hearing for some time from Dutch climate scientists that their American colleagues were complaining about such undue political pressures from this Republican administration. But as long as no one spoke up, it didn't seem to be an issue. In a way we should be glad that this stuff has finally hit the fan. It is out in the open now.

[rant]
One more anti-science offensive from Republicans. If they are so sure that man-made global warming is nonsense, why don;t they keep their heads cool. And if they so keen to promote intelligent design, why don't they apply it to Iraq?[/rant]

[Ronin]

of course some scientific teories are wrong....then they are reviewed...and they are abandoned......the ones that are considered right aren´t abandoned and stay until something might be discovered to deny it....

that is the basis of the scientific process.....to try and spin this into some sort of backwards anti-science propaganda piece is frankly sad, showns the pathetic state that some people go down to, trying to push their views on everyone else......i´d expect the organizers of the spanish enquisition had the same basic mindset...

one would hope we would be beyond that by now.....guess i´m wrong..

[Red Harvest]

Ronin,

Love the sig! So true.

[Steppe Merc]

Gawain, I don't think government people are at all better sources for oil and global warming, considering some of their views on science.

[Goofball]

Did the fact that the earth was flat stand up to peer review? It sure did.

Well, if by "peer review" you mean having the village priest tell anybody who said the Earth was round that they were filthy heretics and had better shut up, then yes, I guess the flat Earth theory did withstand "peer review" for a time...

[AggonyDuck]

Well with our current rate of consumption we're bound to run out of oil at some point and Global Warming is a fact too. This can be understood with some common sense. (Global Warming is just nice anyways, if it continues with this rate we won't have cold winters in Finland when I'm on pension )

[Azi Tohak]

Nooo! So the research I have done for 4 years is not useful? NOOO!

Wait... I've known that for 3.75 years, who am I kidding.

Interesting article... but seems very strange to me that so many will be false for something like Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Biology. The soft 'sciences' like psychology, sociology basically anything that has to do with analyzing people? Sure, I could under some of them are not reproducable. Two people are not exactly alike. Two molecules of X? Yup! They sure can be (with allowances for isotopes).

Azi

[Papewaio]

So if the papers have a 1 in ten chance of being right.

What is the chance of ten different papers that all are in agreement of being wrong? (about 1 in 3)

If the papers are 40% likely to be right. Then if you have ten papers in agreement then they are wrong 0.7% of the time.

Mind you science is not a democracy.

You can have a hundred papers in agreement, but one will trump it... I suppose science is more like bridge.

[Aenlic]

Wow, an entire article demonstrating Epimenides' paradox with the author apparently completely oblivious to it. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Look for every paper thats quoted here the otherside comes up with a paper to refute it. They cant all be right. There is no consensus on things like global warming or how much oil there is on the planet. On top of that most old scientific theories have been found to be incorrect.

So if the papers have a 1 in ten chance of being right.

What is the chance of ten different papers that all are in agreement of being wrong? (about 1 in 3)

.

What in heavens name are you talking about? This has to be some kind of new math.

You can have a hundred papers in agreement, but one will trump it... I suppose science is more like bridge.

Hence proving the authors point.

[Papewaio]

This article is referring to probablilties and sample size.

If you have a 1 in ten chance on being right, you have a 9 in ten chance of being wrong.

The chance that ten papers that are in agreement are all wrong (as long as they are using different samples) is probably about equal to[ 1 - 0.9^10 ]
as it is highly unlikely that you will get agreement if the data is wrong. This is using simple probabilities and giving it the same characteristics as rolling a dice... it does not factor in human error and special interest groups.

Also how wrong is wrong?

If one paper estimates oil reserves is 500 years while another estimates 400 years are they both wrong? Or can we say that the amount of oil is probably about 450 +/- 100 years?

The normal trend is to come out with a general idea and have that one refined over time. It is not unusual for orginal papers on a subject to be way off base. This is part of the fun of science, continual exploration and refinement of what we do.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

The normal trend is to come out with a general idea and have that one refined over time. It is not unusual for orginal papers on a subject to be way off base. This is part of the fun of science, continual exploration and refinement of what we do..

Which is exactly what the author claims. Yet again people take these papers as gospel and are willing to invest billions of dollars of our money in unproven theories.

[Papewaio]

Which is exactly what the author claims. Yet again people take these papers as gospel and are willing to invest billions of dollars of our money in unproven theories.

I would suggest more research.

Also I would double check who is underwriting the research paper.

Which papers are you disputing?

If you dispute them, disprove them.

[Soulforged]

I really can't see the big deal here. Popper said that the value of science (deduction) was on it's refutability and then some other (i think it was Kant or Kelsen) stated that the science appeared in form of paradigmas that can be refuted over an over, everytime closer to the truth and with best results. So we could be in the presence of another paradigma.

[bmolsson]

I guess that puts scientific writings right beside religious scriptures.....

[English assassin]

But if you go back in time the majority of scientific papers have been refuted as we gain new knowledege. Whats right today is wrong tommorow.

I love the way the unique strength of the scientific process is somehow seem as a weakness. Newton's theory of gravitation was proved wrong (or it might be better to say incomplete) by Einstein, not that that stopped Nasa using it to put men on the moon. But heck, its wrong. Back to Intelligent Falling then.

As Keynes said, "When facts change, I change my mind. What, sir, do you do?"

[Gawain of Orkeny]

As Keynes said, "When facts change, I change my mind. What, sir, do you do?"

Then I suggest they were not FACTS.

[Aenlic]

The difference is that science attempts to find answers to the best degree of accuracy available, while acknowledging that the answers may not be complete and may change based upon new data.

Religion, on the other hand, seeks to provide answers which may not then be refuted or argued against and are from then on assumed to be the one and only ultimate truth, unchangeable, and infallible; and when questions provoke answers which disagree with the one and only ultimate infallible truth, the religious try to change the question to conform to the answer they wish to hear.