Popper’s approach still works here. When some one writes a statistics based paper, they basically have said “I have a hypothesis that X correlates with Y. If th

Popper’s approach still works here. When some one writes a statistics based paper, they basically have said “I have a hypothesis that X correlates with Y. If this is not true (falsifiable), X will not correlate with Y in this data”. The hypothesis survives the test and this is science. Of course, the authors probably did the opposite, but this doesn’t matter for the philosophical underpinnings. So how do we detect bad studies? With this same framework. Take the same hypothesis, but design a different test. If the hypothesis fails the treat, publish that. That is science. We shouldn’t be so hung up on reproducing old papers or scrutinizing every study. You’ll get lost in the details. If a hypothesis is true, it will stand up to every test of it. So if you doubt a result, test it!