SCIENCE is an iterative process, a steady march away from ignorance and towards enlightenment, a gradual unveiling of the hidden truth of why things are the way they are. There are some mistakes along the way, and a lot of discoveries of why things aren’t the way they aren’t, but on the whole we inch closer to the ultimate truth with each new development. Don’t we?
Not necessarily. There is a growing uneasiness that, in some areas like medicine at least, a great deal of current research is not only useless but positively damaging.
It is hard to accept that any new science can actually cause harm, because – surely – all knowledge is good. But it is hard to deny the evidence that basic systematic error is inherent in the scientific method, and even that the majority of published research is false.
This idea has been around for a little while, and was expounded by John Ioannidis in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine in 2005. See the provocatively-titled paper Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.
This week has seen two new publications addressing the issue. An opinion article in Nature by Daniel Sarewitz speaks about the mounting evidence that bias in research is not random, but that bias and error are trending in the same direction.
Meanwhile a paper in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice reported on a review of scientific trials, concluding that the majority were not true and suggesting that more work was needed on ‘scientific dynamics within healthcare research and evidence-based practice constructs’.
The full paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract is here.
Lead author Roger Kerry makes an astonishing observation on a blog post this week, writing about scientific error in the real world: “…if biases were random, multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Our findings showed that … study outcomes tended to diverge from the truth. So, the most recent and highest quality trials were the worst predictors of truth.”
This is all a bit worrying. Far from enlightenment, current scientific research methods may be leading us to a new age of endarkenment.
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Russ Swan
editor, LabHomepage.com
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If most scientific research work is wrong, then it is likely that all those research works cited above are wrong. No?
Jokes apart, those studies (Plos Medicine, J. Eval. Clin. Prac…) are focusing in clinical/medical/similar stuff.
It is difficult to accept that most of research in _hard_ sciences (physics, chemistry…) is wrong and I do not know a single study that even suggest that.