“most published research findings are probably false” – John Ioannidis

The worlds of academic and commercial research are being riven at the moment with concerns and accusation about how poor much of the research and conclusions that have been published are. This particular problem is not specifically about market research, it covers health research, machine learning, bio-chemistry, neuroscience, and much more. The problem relates to the way that tests are being created and interpreted. One of the key people highlighting the concerns about this problem is John Ioannidis from Stanford University and his work has been reported both in academic and popular forums (for example The Economist). The quote “most published research findings are probably false.” comes from Ioannidis. Key Quotes Here are some of the quotes and worries floating about at the moment: America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) – researchers would find it hard to reproduce at least three-quarters of all published biomedical findings Sandy Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – three-quarters of published scientific papers in the field of machine learning are bunk because of this “overfitting” John Bohannon, a biologist at Harvard, submitted an error stewm paper on a cancer drug derived from lichen to 350 journals (as an experiment), 157 […]