From Slashdot.org 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.’
Here’s the link to the article written by John P. A. Ioannidis: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&ct=1
Interesting article.
Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.’
Reading this reminded me of an article I read a while back in the National Post by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick about their presentation last year to the NAS WRT Mann’s work that lead to the infamous Hockey Stick graph. Does this sound familiar: