Stanford University To Open A Center For Studying Bad Science
Scientific Papers Ryan Snook Among Stanford University's palm trees and sandstone arches—the picture of ivory-tower—there's going to be a center dedicated to chipping away that ivory, The Economist reports. The university plans to open a Meta-Research Innovation Center: a center for the study of bad science. The center will take aim at biomedical studies that are poorly designed, are redundant, weren't published because they report negative results, and/or independent scientists can't reproduce. The idea is that an enormous number of published studies showing that Drug X cures Disease Y, or that Gene A is related to Condition B, are actually incorrect. Drug X doesn't cure Disease Y, or isn't really better at curing Disease Y than Drug Z, which has been around forever. Nevertheless, because of poor statistical analysis or other problems, scientific journals publish these untrue studies. Doctors...