too many scientific results are simply wrong
In the past days there was some hype about an old Malaria drug, Chloroquine and the closely related Hydroxychloroquine, and whether it might help against Covid-19. Particularly Donald Trump indicated he thinks the drug is promising and Elon Musk tweeted about it . Hydroxychloroquine showed promising results in an in vitro study , but that is obviously no evidence that it will do any good in…
Recently there was an article on the Science webpage about replication problems in artificial intelligence research . The article mainly highlights the fact that many studies in the field fail to provide supplemental code and data. But it also mentions an example how replications can go wrong. They mention the project and journal ReScience . It describes itself as "a peer-reviewed journal that…
I gave a talk at the 34C3 congress: Science is broken Video downloads at media.ccc.de , Youtube version , Slides Here's a list of related interesting links for people who want to learn more about these issues. General Is most published research wrong? (Video) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, John P. A. Ioannidis, PLOS Reproducibility and Improving Research Practices (Video, BIH…
I got a question to participate in a survey for a scientific study a couple of days ago due to some work I do in the field of IT security. I wrote the e-mail below to the study author. While participating in a survey or not is not a big deal I think everyone participating in any kind of study should care about the scientific practices she/he supports. Dear [...], You have asked me to participate…
Image source Since I cultivate an interest in all the weaknesses today's scientific process one thing I often ask myself is why the scientific community isn't fixing things faster. There are many obvious improvements that are ignored by many scientists, problems that are not tackled, and sometimes there is outright resistance against changes that should hardly be controversial. A recent editorial…
On Friday a documentary aired on German and French television channel Arte about dietary and weight loss studies . The authors of the documentary had done an experiment where they created a fake study claiming that eating dark chocolate can help with weight loss. The study was done in cooperation with science journalist John Bohannon, who wrote about the experiment on io9.com . They did a real…
The organization COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) has issued a statement that indicates attempts to manipulate the peer review process on a large scale . While not much details are available it indicates that some agencies provide "services" to scientific publishers that include fake peer reviewers. The strategy by these agencies seems to be to submit papers to scientific journals and at the…
A study published today by the British Medical Journal tries to investigate the often unhealthy relationship between biomedical and health related studies, press releases on the studies and the resulting news articles. There's a widespread feeling among scientifically minded people that “the media gets it wrong”. This is hardly controversial, it's always good to have some scientific data on the…
Peer review is often described as one of the cornerstones of good science. The idea is simple: Before a scientific work is published it is reviewed by at least two people from the same field and they decide if it is worth publishing. Peer review is widely seen as the thing that distinguishes science from pseudoscience. However in reality things are not so simple and this simplified view can even…
If you've been following news in the past months you could read that scientific studies found out that pesticides are linked to autism, an intelligent computer passed the so-called Turing test, a new mathematical algorithm will endanger the security of the internet, a higher concentration of antioxidants in organic food makes them healthier, PowerPoint slides make people stupid and apples improve…