News on flawed studies:
This research group seeks to expose weaknesses in science—and they’ll step on some toes if they have to
TILBURG, THE NETHERLANDS—In August 2011, Diederik Stapel, a prominent psychologist and a dean at Tilburg University, confessed to faking data for dozens of papers over 15 years.
In the mid-2000s, it was an open secret that many findings were irreproducible, he says, but scientists feared that discussing this would cast the whole field into doubt. Then in 2005, John Ioannidis, now co-director of Stanford University's Meta-research Innovation Center in Palo Alto, California, published a provocative essay, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
Curious about the impact of unusual data points on statistical analyses, [Wicherts] and his colleagues asked the authors of 141 recent papers for their data, so that they could reanalyze them. To their surprise, 73% of the authors didn't reply or said they were not willing or able to share the data, even though the journals that published the studies stipulated they should.
Wicherts says some researchers fear such critiques could jeopardize funding or breed mistrust in science. And the Tilburg studies have shaken the illusion that scientists are more objective than most people, underscoring that most researchers have a poor ability to look objectively at data and overestimate the statistical power of their studies.
www.sciencemag.org
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