Problems with scientific research
How science goes wrong
Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself
[[There are a lot of articles with this subject, but due to the deserved reputation of the Economist I am putting this one on the blog. D. G.]]
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A SIMPLE idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should
always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea
has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century,
modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for
the better.
But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much
trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and
of humanity.
In this section
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How science goes wrong
Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of
shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A
rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published
research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year
researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of
53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug
company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A
leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield
are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based
on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
What a load of rubbish
Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much
of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of
some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are
hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern
academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it
was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few
hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on
the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and
quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over
academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of
results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose
high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most
striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little
wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a
paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut
feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the
odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between
the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise.
Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling
papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play
video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for
publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of
published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as
important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures
means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already
investigated by other scientists.
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be,
either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the
field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had
deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being
tested.
If it’s broke, fix it
All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to
discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One
priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have
done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with
statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold
oodles of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an
early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of
truly significant ones.
Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and
monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with
the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more
substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of
drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be
open for other researchers to inspect and test.
The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to
humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National
Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are
working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of
scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need
to go much further. Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work,
and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be
tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication
evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in
recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure
that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its
privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and
to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the
universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard
at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable
barrier to understanding.