A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research

[Art Vandelay]

I found this article quite interesting.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/cornells-food-and-brand-lab-has-a-major-problem.html

A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research

The Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University publishes a huge amount of research about how people perceive, consume, and think about food. The lab covers subjects ranging from seasonal trends in weight gain to how happy music influences employees, and its director, the marketing and consumer behavior expert Brian Wansink, regularly touts his lab’s research during his frequent media appearances, focusing particularly on the behavioral science underlying people’s consumption habits.

And of course, when there's shoddy research, there are often parallels with PACE:

At first glance, the Food and Brand Lab is an exemplar of a wildly successful, publicly facing research institution dedicated to improving the real world through applied behavioral-science findings. Or it felt that way, at least, before Wansink published a strange blog post last month, which led to the subsequent discovery of 150 errors in just four of his lab’s papers, strong signs of major problems in the lab’s other research, and a spate of questions about the quality of the work that goes on there. Wansink, meanwhile, has refused to share data that could help clear the whole thing up.

Perhaps some of the people mentioned in the article might be interested in PACE?

Jordan ... Anaya is a computational biologist and independent researcher who created PrePubMed, a search engine for preprints, or draft versions of research that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. Anaya has also created tools to help detect statistical anomalies in published research, and a friend of his asked him to apply one of those tools to the Wansink papers.

When he found some problems, he notified Nick Brown, a Ph.D. student at University Medical Center Groningen and “Self-appointed data police cadet,” as per his Twitter bio, whose data-sleuthing techniques power Anaya’s software. They teamed up with Tim van der Zee, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands

Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University statistician known as one of the smartest and most widely read skeptics of sexy but shoddy research findings — not to mention one of the most acerbic.

 

[Mohawk1995]

I am suspect initially of any research and question that of people I even trust. That should be common practice. Secondly there has to be a way of connecting the dots with the research to what is being seen. For medical research, in my opinion, that means that there has to be clinical research to back up the laboratory findings and the findings must correlate with what is seen clinically. Lastly the recommendations of the research also have to work (I know that sounds like a given) and be practical and reproduceable.

Research data can be twisted and there is a lot of it out there that is not necessarily "shoddy" research but is not practical in any way. Meaning, "great research" but not useful. It should either be directly useful or lead to discoveries that are useful. Again I know that sounds simple minded, but you would be surprised at what "comes down the pike".

It is a rare find indeed to locate a "teaching institution" (should be "learning institution") where there are not massive egos and politics at work. All of these filter into the research process and frequently lead to suspect results and arguments a plenty. I think Dr Lerner had it right by having his own practice affiliated with a teaching hospital. He was not trying to be all that. Just trying to help people in need. The academic environment that seems to be close to this is Stanford, but I am sure even there "people" stuff rears it ugly head.