Very Interesting Article on Scientific Papers
rjmudlax13
Posts: 900 Member
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/
Some highlights:
Some highlights:
The important lesson here is that a single analysis is not sufficient to find a definitive answer. Every result is a temporary truth, one that’s subject to change when someone else comes along to build, test and analyze anew.
Marcus and Oransky contend that retractions shouldn’t automatically be viewed as a stain on the scientific enterprise; instead, they signal that science is fixing its mistakes.
Many reviewers just don’t check the methods and statistics sections of a paper, and Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, told me that’s partly because they’re not paid or rewarded for time-consuming peer review work.
Predatory journals flourish, in part, because of the sway that publication records have when it comes to landing jobs and grants, creating incentives for researchers to pad their CVs with extra papers.
Science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, “science operates as a procedure of uncertainty reduction,” said Nosek, of the Center for Open Science. “The goal is to get less wrong over time.” This concept is fundamental — whatever we know now is only our best approximation of the truth. We can never presume to have everything right.
Media accounts of science tend to gloss over the nuance, and it’s easy to understand why. For one thing, reporters and editors who cover science don’t always have training on how to interpret studies. And headlines that read “weak, unreplicated study finds tenuous link between certain vegetables and cancer risk” don’t fly off the newsstands or bring in the clicks as fast as ones that scream “foods that fight cancer!”
People often joke about the herky-jerky nature of science and health headlines in the media — coffee is good for you one day, bad the next — but that back and forth embodies exactly what the scientific process is all about. It’s hard to measure the impact of diet on health, Nosek told me. “That variation [in results] occurs because science is hard.” Isolating how coffee affects health requires lots of studies and lots of evidence, and only over time and in the course of many, many studies does the evidence start to narrow to a conclusion that’s defensible. “The variation in findings should not be seen as a threat,” Nosek said. “It means that scientists are working on a hard problem.”
The scientific method is the most rigorous path to knowledge, but it’s also messy and tough. Science deserves respect exactly because it is difficult — not because it gets everything correct on the first try. The uncertainty inherent in science doesn’t mean that we can’t use it to make important policies or decisions. It just means that we should remain cautious and adopt a mindset that’s open to changing course if new data arises. We should make the best decisions we can with the current evidence and take care not to lose sight of its strength and degree of certainty. It’s no accident that every good paper includes the phrase “more study is needed” — there is always more to learn.
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