Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
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Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#2The analysis in question:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#3This is a great issue to highlight. However, I'm unconvinced we need to optimize around creating research that can be reproducible, rather that the process of science generates the best possible results.
Both the scientific and lay public should read this (appropriately) as: one study does not prove a result, there is an 89% chance that a single research paper is simply wrong.
This mentality seems to be the bigger gap, although generating high quality research is a big part of the equation (mostly I think for the wasting of resources to validate, process, and reproduce claims).
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#4This is one of the reasons I went into math and software. In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong. Still, part of the reason this is so is that to show any results everything must be laid on the table. CS and Math papers are therefore open by design and the world has benefited. I hope the rest of science will move in this direction.
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#5An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#6This is one of the reasons I went into math and software. In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong. Still, part of the reason this is so is that to show any results everything must be laid on the table. CS and Math papers are therefore open by design and the world has benefited. I hope the rest of science will move in this direction.
CS has similar problem, specially in AI fields. Researches often claim the accuracy rate more than 95%, but in reality that is much lesser (in fact less than 10% in most of the claims).
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#7After hearing similar things about psychology papers, this is rather disconcerting. This is why I am a climate change skeptic, I don't know whether it is happening due to CO2 or not, but I am confident that science can't be confident when they can't do control experiments. You can't control for any variable when it comes to the climate, let alone all the reasonable ones. We have infinitely more capabilities to control variables when researching cancer than we do with the climate of something as massive and complex as the earths climate, and it turns out our confidence is cancer research may kind of suck.
one interested in the subject should check out feynman's discussion on the psychological effect on scientific research. Millikan use bad assumptions for his oil drop experiment to determine the charge of an electron, but nobody would publish results that differed too much. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#8Scientific publications have a history of having papers contradictory to each other for a long time. In medical research, findings are often based on statics results from limited samples. From that perspective, it will be a big surprise if they are more accurate than public polls.
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#9So maybe we need rename Life Sciences to Life Arts?
Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible
#10What the hell? That's 5.83 papers. How do you reproduce .83 of something?