A key principle of the scientific method is that experiments must be reproducible. That is, an experiment has scientific validity only if another person tries the same experiment and gets the same result.
It has been coming out that a big percentage–possibly a majority of psychological and social science experiments are not reproducible. That is understandable, since human beings are active agents and so cannot be expected to be as predictable as inanimate objects.
But now scientists are discovering that a large percentage of biomedical studies are also non-reproducible!
From Adam Hoffman, Biomedical Science Studies Are Shockingly Hard to Reproduce | Science | Smithsonian:
It’s hard to argue against the power of science. From studies that evaluate the latest dietary trend to experiments that illuminate predictors of happiness, people have come to increasingly look at scientific results as concrete, reliable facts that can govern how we think and act.
But over the past several years, a growing contingent of scientists has begun to question the accepted veracity of published research—even after it’s cleared the hurdles of peer review and appears in widely respected journals. The problem is a pervasive inability to replicate a large proportion of the results across numerous disciplines.
In 2005, for instance, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, used several simulations to show that scientific claims are more likely to be false than true. And this past summer Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, attempted to replicate the findings of 100 psychology studies and found that only 39 percent of the results held up under rigorous re-testing.
“There are multiple lines of evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that have begun to bring the reproducibility of a substantial segment of scientific literature into question,” says Ioannidis. “We are getting millions of papers that go nowhere.”
[Keep reading. . .]
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