Stop ignoring misconduct : Efforts to reduce irreproducibility in research must also tackle...

[Kyla]

http://www.nature.com/news/stop-ignoring-misconduct-1.20498

excerpt:

Stop ignoring misconduct

• Donald S. Kornfeld
• & Sandra L. Titus

31 August 2016
Efforts to reduce irreproducibility in research must also tackle the temptation to cheat, argue Donald S. Kornfeld and Sandra L. Titus.


The history of science shows that irreproducibility is not a product of our times. Some 350 years ago, the chemist Robert Boyle penned essays on “the unsuccessfulness of experiments”. He warned readers to be sceptical of reported work. “You will meet with several Observations and Experiments, which ... may upon further tryal disappoint your expectation.” He attributed the problem to a 'lack of skill in the scientist and the lack of purity of the ingredients', and what would today be referred to as inadequate statistical power.


By 1830, polymath Charles Babbage was writing in more cynical terms. In Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, he complains of “several species of impositions that have been practised in science”, namely “hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking”.

In other words, irreproducibility is the product of two factors: faulty research practices and fraud. Yet, in our view, current initiatives to improve science dismiss the second factor. For example, leaders at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) stated in 2014: “With rare exceptions, we have no evidence to suggest that irreproducibility is caused by scientific misconduct”1. In 2015, a symposium of several UK science-funding agencies convened to address reproducibility, and decided to exclude discussion of deliberate fraud.

To dismiss the role of research misconduct is mistaken and unfortunate. At best, ignoring deliberate misconduct in efforts to reduce irreproducibility is a wasted opportunity, like tilling a field without clearing it of rocks. At worst, it permits destructive behaviour to persist and flourish...

 

[alex3619]

I would argue reproducing research does not fully deal with faulty research practices as commonly understood. The two are not synonymous. Its about bias. Bias can be intrinsic to study design, or involve issues with instrumentation, or human action, or a great many things. Bias may also not be perceptible, and what seems like good research practices may be intrinsically biased but this might not be obvious to start with.

Science needs better methodology, for sure, especially in disciplines like psychiatry where the difficulty of the subject matter has led to a permissive attitude towards methodology.

This is a deep complex subject, and it involves evidence based medicine and its failures, failures in medical education and culture, the bureaucratization of medicine, pharma doing research on their own products, acceptance of unscientific practices in medicine because of medical culture, and so on. Bias is always possible, systems need to be in place to minimize bias from all causes, not just the easy targets.