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The Science of Getting It Wrong (and how to make it right - eventually)
extracts below:
If the press release article seems important to you, it would be best if you read the entire article in the link. My takeaway is that if it is an important result, it should be rigorously duplicated and reduplicated. Not accepted and falsely circulated as official dogma. ================================================== ===== February 27, 2007 The Science of Getting It Wrong: How to Deal with False Research Findings The key may be for researchers to work closer and check one another's results http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...43F150B0DE1355 By JR Minkel FALSE POSITIVES: Researchers poring over their samples for novel results may be contributing to a flood of false research results. Tighter collaboration between investigators may be one way to reduce such errors. Talk about making waves. Two years ago medical researcher John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina in Greece offered mathematical "proof" that most published research results are wrong. Now, statisticians using similar methods found—not surprisingly—that the more researchers reproduce a finding, the better chance it has of being true. Another research team says researchers have to draw conclusions from imperfect information, but offers a way to draw the line between justified and unjustified risks. snip In his widely read 2005 PLoS Medicine paper, Ioannidis, a clinical and molecular epidemiologist, attempted to explain why medical researchers must frequently repeal past claims. In the past few years alone, researchers have had to backtrack on the health benefits of low-fat, high-fiber diets and the value and safety of hormone replacement therapy as well as the arthritis drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market after being found to cause heart attacks and strokes in high-risk patients. Using simple statistics, without data about published research, Ioannidis argued that the results of large, randomized clinical trials—the gold standard of human research—were likely to be wrong 15 percent of the time and smaller, less rigorous studies are likely to fare even worse. [NB - such as many "quick and dirty "preliminary investigations"] snip "I fully agree that replication is key for improving credibility & replication is more important than discovery," Ioannidis says..... But Ioannidis left out one twist: The odds that a finding is correct increase every time new research replicates the same result, according to a study published in the current PLoS Medicine. Lead study author Ramal Moonesinghe, a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that for simplicity's sake his group ignored the possibility that results can be replicated by repeating the same biases. The presence of bias reduces but does not erase the value of replication, he says. Ioannidis says that researchers have become increasingly sophisticated at acquiring large amounts of data from genomics and other studies, and at spinning it in different ways—much like TV weathercasters proclaiming every day a record-setting meteorological event of some sort. As a result, he says, it is easy to come up with findings that are "significant" in the statistical sense, yet not scientifically valid. snip Ioannidis agrees that perfect certainty is impossible. "If you have a severe disease and there is only one medication available, and you know that it is only 5 percent likely to work, why not use it?" he says. But implementing such a calculus is trickier than it appears, he adds, because "we cannot assume that an intervention is necessarily safe in the absence of strong data testifying to this." http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...43F150B0DE1355 |
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