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A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more

602 points by hhs 5y ago

Dah00n 5y ago
So, clickbait science? :)
- XorNot 5y ago
  By definition a paper which is wrong is going to be cited a whole bunch as people disprove it though. The real issue is that citation count is a terrible metric and always has been (when I was doing research the magic you wanted was the low but not no citation count paper which went into a huge amount of detail on exactly what they did).
  - kovvy 5y ago
    My most cited paper has the head of an institution down as an author. Most, but far from all, of the citations are from students there. A previous paper introduced the concept and tools to apply it, while the cited paper just adds an example application and a host of authors.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  Oddly, I think this kinda is, especially the 150x difference they're claiming. Replication failures disproportionately hit high-profile journals. The journals' editorial processes favor "surprising", counter-intuitive claims: life based on arsenic, stem cells created by treating skin cells with a mild acid, cold fusion, etc. The prior probability these are true is lower (hence the surprise). At the same time, this also makes it more likely that someone will attempt to replicate the results--and that there will be interest in a negative paper if they can't.
lasfter 5y ago
The issue is that the authors of bad papers still participate in the peer-review process. If they are the only expert reviewers and you do not pay proper respect to their work, they will squash your submission. To avoid this, papers can propagate mistakes for a long time. Personally, I'm always very careful to cite and praise work by "competing" researchers even when that work has well-known errors, because I know that those researchers will review my paper and if there aren't other experts on the review committee the paper won't make it. I wish I didn't have to, but my supervisor wants to get tenured and I want to finish grad school, and for that we need to publish papers. Lots of science is completely inaccessible for non-experts as a result of this sort of politics. There is no guarantee that the work you hear praised/cited in papers is actually any good; it may have been inserted just to appease someone. I thought that this was something specific to my field, but apparently not. Leaves me very jaded about the scientific community.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  What is it that makes you have a nice career in research? Is it a robust pile of publishing or is it a star finding? Can you get far on just pure volume? I want to answer the question "if I were a researcher and were willing to cheat to get ahead, what should be the objective of my cheating?"
  - lasfter 5y ago
    I suppose it depends on how you define nice? If you cheat at some point people will catch on, even if you don't face any real consequences. So if you want prestige within your community then cheating isn't the way to go. If you want to look impressive to non-experts and get lots of grant money/opportunities, I'd go for lots of straightforward publications in top-tier venues. Star findings will come under greater scrutiny.
    - rscho 5y ago
      Not outright cheating, but cooking results to seem better/surprising and publishing lots of those shitty papers is the optimal way to build a career in many fields. In medicine, for example.
      - lasfter 5y ago
        Cooking results seems like outright cheating to me.
        DistressedDrone 5y ago
        It's more complicated than that. It can look something like this: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
  - gowld 5y ago
    For grants and tenure, 100 tiny increments over 10 years are much better for your research career then 1 major paper in 5 years that is better than all of them put together. If you want to write a pop book and on TV and sell classes, you need one interesting bit of pseudoscience and a dozen followup papers using the same bad methodology.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Are papers ever cited if the results are disproven? Would papers have cited the notorious Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism if they were writing about how their results do not match that paper? Does that count as a cite?
- petschge 5y ago
  Yes you cite the paper that you disagree with and yes by typical bibliometric measures that is counted as a citation.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Yes, citations aren't endorsements. Some citations (rarely) are negative/explicitly critical, but this kind of difference isn't tracked. A citation is a citation.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  They do look at the quality of the citations; even after failing to replicate, most citations did not reference that failure to replicate.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    I think this is difficult to check convincingly. References are often ambiguous. A mention like “Although some have argued X[1]” could be skeptical, but not explicit, about Reference #1’s quality. I could mean that there’s convincing data on both sides, or I could mean that Ref #1 is hot garbage (but don’t want a fight). In some cases, there might be legitimately useful information in a retracted paper. If a paper describe an experiment, but then shows faked results, I’m not sure it’s wrong to cite it if you use a similar setup; that is where the idea came from, after all. Most critically, there’s an unpredictable and often long lag between reading a paper, citing it one’s own work, and that work being published. I’ve had things sit at a journal for a year before publication, and it never occurred to me to “re-verify” the citations I included; indeed, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
- neffy 5y ago
  Yes. That's the core problem. If you cite a paper to refute it, or to refer to its refutation, that just bumps its citation count. We haven't scaled the practice of science for the 21st century.
endisneigh 5y ago
Perhaps the government should have a team of people who randomly try to replicate science papers that are funded by the government. The government can then reduce funding to institutions that have too high a percentage of research that failed to be replicated. From that point the situation should resolve itself as institutions wouldn’t want to lose funding - so they’d either have an internal group replicate before publishing or coordinate with other institutions pre-publish. Anything I’m missing?
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  Sounds like an easy way to introduce more corruption into scientific research rather than remove it
- pomian 5y ago
  This is what industry does though. That is in the less theoretical fields. If you actually want to make something that works, then you need to base your science on provable fact. Produce oil, build a cool structure, generate electricity. Based on amazing and complex science, but it has to work. Conclusion is that the science that is done needs to be provable, but that means practical. Which is unfortunate. Because what about all that science that may be, or one day may be, practical?
  - taneq 5y ago
    This is like the xkcd test for weird science: Is some big boring company making billions with it? If so (quantum physics) then it’s legit. If not (healing crystals, orgone energy, essential oils...) it probably doesn’t work.
    - logicchains 5y ago
      >Is some big boring company making billions with it? If so (quantum physics) then it’s legit. If not (healing crystals, orgone energy, essential oils...) it probably doesn’t work. That's no guarantee; in 2020 the US essential oils industry was worth $18.62 billion: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/essential-oils-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/essentia... . Which is bigger than the US music recording industry (https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music-industry-grew-by-over-1bn-in-2020-but-faces-big-challenges-over-streamings-pricing-and-its-growth/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music...).
mc32 5y ago
One my pet peeves is when the local NPR station will advocate some position or policy based on a recent small study (usually by/at some state school), sometimes they'll couch it saying it's not peer reviewed, it's preliminary, or something, but it's too late, they already planted the seed, had their talking point -all with a study to back up their position and listeners just go along with it.
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  Start up idea - run hundreds of “preliminary studies” with small sample sizes, then sell any of the p-hacked results to marketing or news groups. Want a story about how milk boosts intelligence? Want a story for how a standing desk leads to promotions? We have it all
  - daenz 5y ago
    I will assume best intentions that this is a sarcastic suggestion, because it is pretty evil and socially irresponsible otherwise :)
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      It is but it might finally pop the bubble around "study says X" in the public's mind
      - visarga 5y ago
        Then people turn away and stop believing in global warming and vaccines.
        iamadog2 5y ago
        Or they develop the critical thinking skills to realize that science is 95% failing and 5% "we don't reject the alternative". It is not absolute, and certainly the scientists themselves are deeply flawed being that they're human. But here's the thing, people don't have time for this. They have work, bills, home and car maintenance, groceries, kids, friends, a slew of media to consume, recreation on top of it - and they're all dying. So it doesn't matter who says what, they're going to pick the dilute politicized version of the results that their team supports and run with it regardless of what the nigh-unreadable highly specialized papers say. Orwell said it well "I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think." And those who do elect the burden of extracurricular mental activity aren't given much in the way of options in any case. What are they to do, disseminate the material to their friends, co-workers, children - quite probably the very same population as mentioned above, weighted with the ceaseless demands of reality? To what end? Chinese whispers? It's better to have them say, "I don't know, I'm not convinced either way." A construal which is developed from adequately exercised critical skills. But that's another discussion about perverse social conditioning no doubt evolved from the deployment of poorly understood technique compounded by its acceptance as custom in education - I'm speaking of course about grading and student assessment. Nobody wants to be stupid at the very least, and professing one's ignorance is construed as an admission of guilt.
azhenley 5y ago
So this is why my papers are cited so little!
ALittleLight 5y ago
In Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers there is a scene or two where the human forces randomly have psychics on their team and it's largely unexplored in the novel. I always thought of it as Heinlein projecting physics to say "In the future we'll have spaceships and robot suits" and projecting psychology out to "Psychics and remote sensors". Maybe that was reasonable given how science was advancing at the time. If so, what powers and advances have poor research systems denied us?
- xibalba 5y ago
  > what powers and advances have poor research systems denied us Alternatively, it may be that all the low hanging fruit in the known orchards are picked. But there are still workers reaching for the remaining higher, rarer fruit. Only a few are needed for what fruit remains. But there is instead a glut of workers. A few are up to the task. The rest pick up leaves and make convoluted arguments about their potential value. "These leaves are edible!" Maybe we need can find new orchards. Or maybe the unpicked orchards are too far away to ever reach. Or maybe they don't exist at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rossdavidh 5y ago
Huh, so untrue (or grossly exaggerated) results are more interesting, and that matters more for getting talked about than truth. Thank goodness our newsmedia business doesn't work that way, or we would be poorly-informed in multiple ways.
- taneq 5y ago
  Yep, basically. Very unexpected results are interesting and newsworthy and more likely wrong.
- bloaf 5y ago
  OR if someone is going to fabricate results, they fabricate them in a direction that they expect others will find interesting.
bonoboTP 5y ago
I mean, both strongly correlate with "surprising finding" so it's no surprise they correlate with each other too.
LetThereBeLight 5y ago
More specifically, this paper is focused on the social sciences. That's not to say that this isn't present in the basic sciences either. But one other thing to note here is that these headlines about a "replication crisis" seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Let's not forget the history of the electron charge. As Feynman said: "We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27s_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...
- lupire 5y ago
  Feynman's examples is of people being more critical about certain issues. A better example is the case of "radiation" that could only be seen in a dark room in the corner of your eye, which turned out to be a human visual artifact and wishful thinking.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I assume you're thinking of N-Rays and Blondlot, but there is another phenomenon that more or less fits your description. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena It's interesting that according to the Wikipedia article it's not entirely certain whether the radiation is producing actual light or just the sensation of light.
bambam24 5y ago
Including this one
calkuta 5y ago
don't worry all the COVID related research is spot-on
ramblerman 5y ago
Pulling up the actual paper, there is an added part the article doesn't mention. > Prediction markets, in which experts in the field bet on the replication results before the replication studies, showed that experts could predict well which findings would replicate (11). So it's even stating that this isn't completely innocent, given different incentives most reviewers identify a suspicious study, but under current incentives it seems letting it through due to the novelty is somehow warranted.
abandonliberty 5y ago
This is almost a tautology. Unlikely/unexpected findings are more noteworthy, so they're more likely to be both cited and false, perhaps based on small sample sizes or p-hacking. People love this stuff. Malcolm Gladwell's made a career on it: half of the stuff he writes about is disproven before he publishes. It's very interesting that facial microexpressions analysis can predict relationship outcome with 90% certainty. Except it's just an overfit model, it can't, and he's no longer my favorite author. [0] Similarly, Thomas Erikson's "Surrounded by Idiots" also lacks validation. [1] Both authors have been making top 10 lists for years, and Audible's top selling list just reminded me of them. Similarly, shocking publications in Nature or Science are to be viewed with skepticism. I don't know what I can read anymore. It's the same with politics. The truth is morally ambiguous, time consuming, complicated, and doesn't sell. I feel powerless against market forces. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman#Critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman#Critiques [1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Z7JiCRI7s4J:https://soccermatics.medium.com/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1&vwsrc=0 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Z7JiC...
kjrose 5y ago
There is a really good reason for this. Everyone wants the shock value for the easy publication but no one wants to do the work to validate the original study because that can imply possibly being wrong. This is a major issue with the current model.
avivo 5y ago
If only we had a magical web of knowledge where updates could instantly be seen, and even propagate as we learn more about the world!
crazygringo 5y ago
> “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’” Obviously, because journals don't attempt replication, nor should they. A study will only have replication by another researcher/team after it's been published. Or not, in which case that's publishable as well. This is how science works and is supposed to work. The problem should rather be: why are journals accepting papers with citations to debunked papers that don't also cite the debunking papers? I've had plenty of friends have a paper get sent back for revisions because it was missing a newer citation. This should be a major responsibility of reviewers. So why aren't peer reviewers staying on top of the literature?
- rscho 5y ago
  > This should be a major responsibility of reviewers. So why aren't peer reviewers staying on top of the literature? Perhaps because reviewing is unpaid work, both in the financial and academic sense?
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    I definitely don't disagree with that!
for_i_in_range 5y ago
They state the cause for replication being the "findings" in the papers "are interesting". Is this really the case? And is this actually a "new" phenomenon? It seems like it could be a disguised version of the Availability Cascade. [1] In other words, when we encounter a simple-to-understand explanation of something complex, the explanation ends up catching on. Then, because the explanation is simple, its popularity snowballs. The idea cascades like a waterfall throughout the public. Soon it becomes common sense—not because of sense, but because of common. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade
dmingod666 5y ago
This is Psychology. Psychology has lots of problems and those are not going away anytime soon. I think more deeper biological monitoring technology like fmri etc. will pave way to more robust studies other than that Don't have much hope..
- tgv 5y ago
  fMRI has been at the avant-garde of p-hacking since its inception. I'm the co-author of several fMRI papers, but not responsible for the actual analysis. That was done by a PhD student under supervision by the head of the institute, fairly influential in his field. The first experiment didn't yield "significant" results, not even after a few months of trying all the possible ways to manipulate the data, but the values were close to acceptable. But since there was no budget to run another experiment, it was decided to add 8 subjects more. And lo and behold, after a few more months of data wrangling, there were significant blobs, and the article was published. To add insult to injury: when subsequent experiments didn't give any interesting results, and the PhD didn't have enough material for graduation, they decided to split the data they already had by gene variants, because technology had just reached the point where that kind of analysis could be done by a sufficiently rich lab. And there was a new result! The original blob was now seen in two areas instead of one, depending on variant. Highly publishable. That that meant that the original finding was now invalidated wasn't even considered. edit: this took place between 2000 and 2010.
  - dmingod666 5y ago
    agree, the sausage-making in science is ugly, but my point is if technology is more accessible, there will be some reliable data points to go by rather than kludging together some experimental premise and then making profound pronouncements. Then those findings are then parroted by everyone. Take for example a study done in about 2005 that said "willpower is an exhaustible resource" - They gave some participants some problems to solve - they were cooking cookies at that back so the participants could smell them. Later, half of the participants were given cucumbers and the other half cookies and then observed that people given cookies persisted for longer in solving the problems. This proved "willpower is an exhaustible resources". Is willpower exhaustible? what if the participants while they were giving up early where given an incentive of 500 USD to continue working on the same problem, would they work for much longer than the other group? why? willpower is an exhaustible resource, how can you draw from something that now no longer exists? would you then conclude that willpower can be depleted in humans, but humans have the ability to synthesize it from currency. Ofcorse thats ridiculous. Willpower and expended effort are context based and each person can set their own threshold of when its appropriate to give up - its partly a conscious decision. A few years later the authors of this same study walked back on their claims that "willpower is an exhaustible resource" ( it does not stop people from touting this around as reasoning for whatever point they are trying to make ). My point is bio-monitoring technology with probably VR will atleast give us some verifiable data-points..
tryonenow 5y ago
That the research is often of poor quality is a consequence partly of perverse incentives, but primarily because there is no incentive currently to replicate research. Give master's students at least the option of replicating research of a minimum quality/complexity. It would be an excellent exercise over the course of the degree, and these would still potentially count as citations for advisors. There would be fewer incentives to risk getting caught doing sloppy research, especially knowingly. But I guess some of the collective pride in academia would need to be swallowed first. I believe there is a certain obligation to dedicate resources to reproducing science, in that without affording as much, the institution itself will erode and eventually fail. In fact I think this has a lot to do with the fact that academia is in a far worse state than many people realize.
MavropaliasG 5y ago
Not surprised that this is in psychology and economics.
pabs3 5y ago
So when will journals start requiring a separate team has replicated the results before publication?
jollybean 5y ago
This may be an existential property of the Scientific Community: the more novel, the more interest, the more popularity ... but also the more likely to be untrue.
dash2 5y ago
It’s ironic, but 153 times is a crazily high figure. I’m suspicious.
- RugnirViking 5y ago
  yeah - I'd be surprised to learn that the average paper in their study had 153 citations regardless of other things. Perhaps they only looked at highly cited papers, but that induces its own issues.
eob 5y ago
I will never forget the day a postdoc in my lab told me not to continue wasting time trying (and failing) to reproduce [Top Institution]’s “Best Paper Award” results from the year prior. He had been there when the work was done and said they manipulated the dataset until they got the numbers they wanted. The primary author is now a hot shot professor. My whole perception of academia and peer review changed that day. Edit to elaborate: like many of our institutions, peer review is an effective system in many ways but was designed assuming good faith. Reviewers accept the author’s results on faith and largely just check to make sure you didn’t forget any obvious angles to cover and that the import of the work is worth flagging for the whole community to read. Since there’s no actual verification of results, it’s vulnerable to attack by dishonesty.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  Honest question: how do we fix this? The obvious solution, prosecuting academics, has an awful precedence attached to it.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    at least in some parts of computer science the solution is easy: do not ever publish results without the public source code of all the experiments.
    - astrange 5y ago
      That isn't possible if you're using commercially licensed source from other people, drivers for scientific instruments, lacking copyright assignment for some of it, etc. Same reason many commercial projects can't be open sourced even if the company wanted to.
      - enriquto 5y ago
        So people who used proprietary software will not be able to publish. Sounds like a win-win to me!
qalmakka 5y ago
I worked in the academic world for two years. What I saw was that lots of people are under a constant pressure to publish, and quantity is often put above quality. I've seen papers without any sort of value or reason to exist being bruteforced through reviewing just to avoid some useless junk data of no value whatsoever being wasted, all to just add a line on someone's CV. This is without saying that some Unis are packed of totally incompetent people that only got to advance their careers by always finding a way to piggyback on someone else's paper. The worst thing I've seen is that reviewing papers is also often offloaded to newly graduated fellows, which are often instructed to be lenient when reviewing papers coming from "friendly universities". The level of most papers I have had the disgrace to read is so bad it made me want to quit that world as soon as I could. I got to the conclusion the whole system is basically a complex game of politics and strategy, fed by a loop in which bad research gets published on mediocre outlets, which then get a financial return by publishing them. This bad published research is then used to justify further money being spent on low quality rubbish work, and the cycle continues. Sometimes you get to review papers that are so comically bad and low effort they almost feel insulting on a personal level. For instance, I had to reject multiple papers not only due their complete lack of content, but also because their English was so horrendous they were basically unintelligible.
- TimPC 5y ago
  Quality is definitely above quantity in academia in almost all disciplines. The issue is citation count is used as a proxy for quality and its a poor one in many respects.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  >English was so horrendous they were basically unintelligible. Maybe this is how the GPT "AI" can generate such similar results. Lol.
zhdc1 5y ago
Keep in mind that highly cited papers are usually first to their field on a particular subject, and it makes sense that they will be usually be less "accurate" simply because they don't have the luxury of building off of a direct line of prior research. The first Tesla Model S isn't anywhere as good as the current version, but it was still groundbreaking. Academic publications work the same way.
- thaw13579 5y ago
  I think the issue with this analogy is: the new and improved Tesla Model S is hugely popular and profitable, while the academic papers that later revisit and improve upon those initial (high impact but less accurate) findings receive little attention or grant support, and consequently the "inaccuracies" persist.
cycomanic 5y ago
I'm not really surprised about the results related to Nature (and Science to a lesser degree). I have seen it multiple times that Nature editors (who are not experts in the field) have overruled reviewer recommendations to reject, because the results were exciting. The incentives for Nature are not to produce great science, but to sell journals and that requires them to give the impression of being on the forefront of "scientific discovery". I've in fact been told by an editor "our job is to make money, not great science)". The irony is that their incentives also make them very risk averse, so they will not publish results which don't have a buzz around them. I know of several papers which created new "fields" which were rejected by the editors. The incentive also results in highly cited authors having an easier time to get published in Nature. I should say that this is typically much better in the journals run by expert editors, published by the technical societies like e.g. IEEE.
maxnoe 5y ago
"We failed to reproduce the results published in [1]" is a citation. "Our findings directly contradict [1]" is a citation. Without context, number of citations doesn't tell you anything.
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  Negative citations are extremely rare. https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#or-Maybe-They-Don-39-t https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... "You might hypothesize that the citations of non-replicating papers are negative, but negative citations are extremely rare.5 One study puts the rate at 2.4%. Astonishingly, even after retraction the vast majority of citations are positive, and those positive citations continue for decades after retraction.6"
MAXPOOL 5y ago
Proposal: 1/ For best journals: a non-replication betting market for peer-reviewed and published papers. Grants to replicate papers that are highest in the betting pool. 2/ Citation index were citing and publishing a paper that does not replicate lowers the score. (This should be first used in machine learning research)
- mjburgess 5y ago
  That would work well if you could connect payouts to teams showing fail/pass on replication; ie., so there was funding available for replication.
zby 5y ago
It is not just research: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
- mjburgess 5y ago
  > Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. - wiki > At a global scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times: this has been epitomized as “Littlewood’s Law: in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” This must now be extended to a global scale for a hyper-networked global media covering anomalies from 8 billion people—all coincidences, hoaxes, mental illnesses, psychological oddities, extremes of continuums, mistakes, misunderstandings, terrorism, unexplained phenomena etc. Hence, there will be enough ‘miracles’ that all media coverage of events can potentially be composed of nothing but extreme outliers, even though it would seem like an ‘extraordinary’ claim to say that all media-reported events may be flukes.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    For this to be true a person has to experience a large number of events. For any meaningful definition of event that's false. So clearly this law requires an event to be routine in some extreme way in order for enough of them to occur that these outliers are hit. So maybe my miracle for this month is I take a breath that is 1/1,000,000 in how unusually large it is.
    - zby 5y ago
      It is about media - the interned and other media are gathering all the outliers and reporting on them - it is not that a person experiences now more events than he used to before the internet.
ta8645 5y ago
Until this is fixed, people need to stop saying "listen to The Science", in an attempt to convince others of a given viewpoint. Skeptical people already distrust our modern scientific institutions; not completely obviously, but definitely when they're cited as a cudgel. Continued articles like this should make everyone stop and wonder just how firm the supposed facts are, behind their own favoured opinions. We need a little more humility about which scientific facts are truly beyond reproach.
- TimPC 5y ago
  We also need to listen to the science on things that are clearly established. The replication crisis is not something that affects almost anything in public debate. Evolution is well established science. Large parts of Climate Change are well established science. Etc.
  - ta8645 5y ago
    And your evidence for that is what exactly? Since this replication problem is already known to appear in multiple disciplines, it's quite likely that the same misconduct is happening in other areas too. I think you're being a little too quick to hope that it doesn't affect those areas where you have a vested interest.
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      There is small but non-zero chance that any given paper on climate change is wrong or fraudulent, but it is absurd to go from that to claiming that we should disregard literally all scientific research that has ever been done. At a certain point you have to accept basic truths like that 2+2=4, or that the earth revolves around the sun, or that the composition of the atmosphere impacts our climate
  - throwkeep 5y ago
    Yea, evolution and climate change are pretty solid. But the projected models do no favor to climate science. Those are bogus. They've mostly been wrong in the past and will be mostly wrong again in the future. There are way too many variables and unknowns, and those accumulate the further out the model reaches.
admissionsguy 5y ago
When I started a PhD in a biomedical field at a top institution, we were told that our results are not that important; what's important is the ability to "sell them". This focus on presentation over content permeated the whole establishment. I remember sitting with a professor trying to come up with plausible buzzwords for a multi-million grant application. The phenomenon described in the articles sounds like a natural consequence of this attitude.
anshumankmr 5y ago
There was a comment I read somewhere (not sure where exactly) but they stated that the modern peer review process would never let someone like Einstein who was a patent clerk ever get the limelight.
TimPC 5y ago
Here is an idea: Replication based grants. Have some portion of academic funding distributed by assigning a pool of money to grantors and having them bet portions of that money on papers they consider impactful AND likely to replicate. Allow the authors to use the money on any research they want. This lets authors get some research money without writing costly and wasteful grant proposals. It takes advantage of the fact that experts in the field can generally tell which studies are likely to replicate (I'm assuming granting agencies can find experts in the field to do this).
amelius 5y ago
Holds for social media too. Posts less likely to be true are liked/reposted more.
alboaie 5y ago
If we embrace meta rationality, we could build tools and wisdom in our culture to sort out this problem.
amai 5y ago
Citations of replicated papers should be multiplied by a high factor to counter balance this effect.
api 5y ago
This is a special case of a more general problem. Inferior technologies very often win in our industry because they are better marketed as well. Marketing is a completely distinct and unrelated skill from doing.
tohnjitor 5y ago
But can THIS study be replicated?
solinent 5y ago
What is the likelihood of this study being true? Will it be cited a lot now?
brockf 5y ago
This is most likely due to a selection process that favors either newsworthiness or trustworthiness. It’s a statistical artifact, see e.g. https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath/status/1396040993175126018?s=21 https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath/status/1396040993175126018?s...
sjg007 5y ago
I think it’s also true about the most upvoted comments. Any article you read on any forum the top comments always seem to be mistaken.
kingsuper20 5y ago
It would be super interesting to compare the quality of equivalent types of papers coming from academia vs. corporate sources.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fastaguy88 5y ago
The paper implies that less reproducible papers have a greater influence on science because they are more highly cited. But an alternate explanation suggests the opposite -- less reproducible papers are more highly cited because people are publishing papers pointing out the results are false. It is also quite telling that the biggest differences in citation counts are for papers published in Nature and Science. But in discipline specific journals (Figs. 1B,C), the effect is very modest. Practicing scientists know that Science and Nature are publish the least reproducible results, in part because they like "sexy" (surprising, less likely to be correct) science, and in part because they provide almost no detail on how experiments were performed (no Materials and Methods). The implication of the paper is that less reproducible science has more impact than reproducible science. But we know this is wrong -- reproducible results persist, while incorrect results do not (we haven't heard much more about the organisms that use arsenic rather than phosphorus in their DNA -- https://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163 )
splithalf 5y ago
This seems really obvious. People demand citations for bold claims, precisely because those claims are hard to believe. The problem is that some fields don’t do replication studies. In such fields these highly cited papers with dubious findings are never debunked, because you know economists to pick on one specific group, don’t do replication studies.
anigbrowl 5y ago
This is the big problem with the 'marketplace of ideas' and the notion that better education and dialog will fix everything. In a small marketplace, like a farmer's market, that's true. Also, markets based on a fungible commodity work OK as long as there's standardization of the product and conditions of perfect competition or something close to them obtain. But in most marketplaces advertising is a dominant force, and advertising power is not a function of product quality; you can market a bad product successfully. There are standards of truth in advertising, but they're loose and poorly enforced, the burden of evaluation falls on the consumer. Additionally, tribalist behavior builds up around products to a certain extent, as buyers of product X who dislike hearing it's good or crap push back on such claims, for varying reasons. Where these differences are purely aesthetic that doesn't matter much, but where they're functional a objectively better product can lose out against a one from a dishonest competitor or one with an irrationally loyal following. A problem for both producers and consumers is that it's more expensive to refute a false claim than to make it, so bad actors are incentivized to lie and lock int he advantage; it's arguably cheaper to apologize if caught out than to forgo the profitable behavior, as exemplified in the aphorism 'it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.' We see the results with problems like the OP and also in things like debates about public health, vaccine safety, climate change, and many other political issues. It's profitable to lie, a significant number of people have no problem doing it, the techniques of doing so have been repeatedly refined and weaponized, and those who rely on or simply prefer truth end up at a significant economic disadvantage. don't make the mistake of thinking this is problem confined to the niche world of academic journals.
couly 5y ago
A lifetime ago I worked on this project: https://cfr.pub/forthcoming/chang-li-2018.pdf https://cfr.pub/forthcoming/chang-li-2018.pdf The experience ucompletely unraveled my faith in academia.
morpheos137 5y ago
Almost certainly this has to do with popular or cherished narratives about reality increasingly diverging from reality. I have seen it here on HN over the past several years. HN used to be a place of thoughtful discussion. Now it is becoming increasingly politicised and redditified. To me it seems all our social structures are decaying. Even look at the language and how everything is faux hyperbole these days. People are forgetting how to think, how to write, how to reason all for the sake of the woke cultural revolution. The political correctness of thought is valued over the ontological correctness.
gumby 5y ago
I don’t mean to pick on one field in particular, but last year I made the throwaway comment to a FB post “arXiv is the new businesswire”. The number of academic “big shots” (friends of the poster, not of me) who “liked” the comment was a bit alarming. There’s too much incentive for fudging things (depending on your field, either grants or company funding). The degree of fraud in Chinese journals is high and well discussed (as it should be). But apart from a small amount of hand-wringing over “the replication crisis” there is no similar condemnation of the work in the rest of the world.

602 points by hhs 5y ago

Dah00n 5y ago

So, clickbait science? :)

XorNot 5y ago
By definition a paper which is wrong is going to be cited a whole bunch as people disprove it though. The real issue is that citation count is a terrible metric and always has been (when I was doing research the magic you wanted was the low but not no citation count paper which went into a huge amount of detail on exactly what they did).
- kovvy 5y ago
  My most cited paper has the head of an institution down as an author. Most, but far from all, of the citations are from students there. A previous paper introduced the concept and tools to apply it, while the cited paper just adds an example application and a host of authors.
mattkrause 5y ago
Oddly, I think this kinda is, especially the 150x difference they're claiming. Replication failures disproportionately hit high-profile journals. The journals' editorial processes favor "surprising", counter-intuitive claims: life based on arsenic, stem cells created by treating skin cells with a mild acid, cold fusion, etc. The prior probability these are true is lower (hence the surprise). At the same time, this also makes it more likely that someone will attempt to replicate the results--and that there will be interest in a negative paper if they can't.

lasfter 5y ago

The issue is that the authors of bad papers still participate in the peer-review process. If they are the only expert reviewers and you do not pay proper respect to their work, they will squash your submission. To avoid this, papers can propagate mistakes for a long time. Personally, I'm always very careful to cite and praise work by "competing" researchers even when that work has well-known errors, because I know that those researchers will review my paper and if there aren't other experts on the review committee the paper won't make it. I wish I didn't have to, but my supervisor wants to get tenured and I want to finish grad school, and for that we need to publish papers. Lots of science is completely inaccessible for non-experts as a result of this sort of politics. There is no guarantee that the work you hear praised/cited in papers is actually any good; it may have been inserted just to appease someone. I thought that this was something specific to my field, but apparently not. Leaves me very jaded about the scientific community.

MattGaiser 5y ago
What is it that makes you have a nice career in research? Is it a robust pile of publishing or is it a star finding? Can you get far on just pure volume? I want to answer the question "if I were a researcher and were willing to cheat to get ahead, what should be the objective of my cheating?"
- lasfter 5y ago
  I suppose it depends on how you define nice? If you cheat at some point people will catch on, even if you don't face any real consequences. So if you want prestige within your community then cheating isn't the way to go. If you want to look impressive to non-experts and get lots of grant money/opportunities, I'd go for lots of straightforward publications in top-tier venues. Star findings will come under greater scrutiny.
  - rscho 5y ago
    Not outright cheating, but cooking results to seem better/surprising and publishing lots of those shitty papers is the optimal way to build a career in many fields. In medicine, for example.
    - lasfter 5y ago
      Cooking results seems like outright cheating to me.
      - DistressedDrone 5y ago
        It's more complicated than that. It can look something like this: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- gowld 5y ago
  For grants and tenure, 100 tiny increments over 10 years are much better for your research career then 1 major paper in 5 years that is better than all of them put together. If you want to write a pop book and on TV and sell classes, you need one interesting bit of pseudoscience and a dozen followup papers using the same bad methodology.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Are papers ever cited if the results are disproven? Would papers have cited the notorious Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism if they were writing about how their results do not match that paper? Does that count as a cite?

petschge 5y ago
Yes you cite the paper that you disagree with and yes by typical bibliometric measures that is counted as a citation.
bonoboTP 5y ago
Yes, citations aren't endorsements. Some citations (rarely) are negative/explicitly critical, but this kind of difference isn't tracked. A citation is a citation.
rossdavidh 5y ago
They do look at the quality of the citations; even after failing to replicate, most citations did not reference that failure to replicate.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  I think this is difficult to check convincingly. References are often ambiguous. A mention like “Although some have argued X[1]” could be skeptical, but not explicit, about Reference #1’s quality. I could mean that there’s convincing data on both sides, or I could mean that Ref #1 is hot garbage (but don’t want a fight). In some cases, there might be legitimately useful information in a retracted paper. If a paper describe an experiment, but then shows faked results, I’m not sure it’s wrong to cite it if you use a similar setup; that is where the idea came from, after all. Most critically, there’s an unpredictable and often long lag between reading a paper, citing it one’s own work, and that work being published. I’ve had things sit at a journal for a year before publication, and it never occurred to me to “re-verify” the citations I included; indeed, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
neffy 5y ago
Yes. That's the core problem. If you cite a paper to refute it, or to refer to its refutation, that just bumps its citation count. We haven't scaled the practice of science for the 21st century.

endisneigh 5y ago

Perhaps the government should have a team of people who randomly try to replicate science papers that are funded by the government. The government can then reduce funding to institutions that have too high a percentage of research that failed to be replicated. From that point the situation should resolve itself as institutions wouldn’t want to lose funding - so they’d either have an internal group replicate before publishing or coordinate with other institutions pre-publish. Anything I’m missing?

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
Sounds like an easy way to introduce more corruption into scientific research rather than remove it
pomian 5y ago
This is what industry does though. That is in the less theoretical fields. If you actually want to make something that works, then you need to base your science on provable fact. Produce oil, build a cool structure, generate electricity. Based on amazing and complex science, but it has to work. Conclusion is that the science that is done needs to be provable, but that means practical. Which is unfortunate. Because what about all that science that may be, or one day may be, practical?
- taneq 5y ago
  This is like the xkcd test for weird science: Is some big boring company making billions with it? If so (quantum physics) then it’s legit. If not (healing crystals, orgone energy, essential oils...) it probably doesn’t work.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    >Is some big boring company making billions with it? If so (quantum physics) then it’s legit. If not (healing crystals, orgone energy, essential oils...) it probably doesn’t work. That's no guarantee; in 2020 the US essential oils industry was worth $18.62 billion: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/essential-oils-market https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/essentia... . Which is bigger than the US music recording industry (https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music-industry-grew-by-over-1bn-in-2020-but-faces-big-challenges-over-streamings-pricing-and-its-growth/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-us-recorded-music...).

mc32 5y ago

One my pet peeves is when the local NPR station will advocate some position or policy based on a recent small study (usually by/at some state school), sometimes they'll couch it saying it's not peer reviewed, it's preliminary, or something, but it's too late, they already planted the seed, had their talking point -all with a study to back up their position and listeners just go along with it.

jtsiskin 5y ago
Start up idea - run hundreds of “preliminary studies” with small sample sizes, then sell any of the p-hacked results to marketing or news groups. Want a story about how milk boosts intelligence? Want a story for how a standing desk leads to promotions? We have it all
- daenz 5y ago
  I will assume best intentions that this is a sarcastic suggestion, because it is pretty evil and socially irresponsible otherwise :)
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    It is but it might finally pop the bubble around "study says X" in the public's mind
    - visarga 5y ago
      Then people turn away and stop believing in global warming and vaccines.
      - iamadog2 5y ago
        Or they develop the critical thinking skills to realize that science is 95% failing and 5% "we don't reject the alternative". It is not absolute, and certainly the scientists themselves are deeply flawed being that they're human. But here's the thing, people don't have time for this. They have work, bills, home and car maintenance, groceries, kids, friends, a slew of media to consume, recreation on top of it - and they're all dying. So it doesn't matter who says what, they're going to pick the dilute politicized version of the results that their team supports and run with it regardless of what the nigh-unreadable highly specialized papers say. Orwell said it well "I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think." And those who do elect the burden of extracurricular mental activity aren't given much in the way of options in any case. What are they to do, disseminate the material to their friends, co-workers, children - quite probably the very same population as mentioned above, weighted with the ceaseless demands of reality? To what end? Chinese whispers? It's better to have them say, "I don't know, I'm not convinced either way." A construal which is developed from adequately exercised critical skills. But that's another discussion about perverse social conditioning no doubt evolved from the deployment of poorly understood technique compounded by its acceptance as custom in education - I'm speaking of course about grading and student assessment. Nobody wants to be stupid at the very least, and professing one's ignorance is construed as an admission of guilt.

azhenley 5y ago

So this is why my papers are cited so little!

ALittleLight 5y ago

In Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers there is a scene or two where the human forces randomly have psychics on their team and it's largely unexplored in the novel. I always thought of it as Heinlein projecting physics to say "In the future we'll have spaceships and robot suits" and projecting psychology out to "Psychics and remote sensors". Maybe that was reasonable given how science was advancing at the time. If so, what powers and advances have poor research systems denied us?

xibalba 5y ago
> what powers and advances have poor research systems denied us Alternatively, it may be that all the low hanging fruit in the known orchards are picked. But there are still workers reaching for the remaining higher, rarer fruit. Only a few are needed for what fruit remains. But there is instead a glut of workers. A few are up to the task. The rest pick up leaves and make convoluted arguments about their potential value. "These leaves are edible!" Maybe we need can find new orchards. Or maybe the unpicked orchards are too far away to ever reach. Or maybe they don't exist at all.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rossdavidh 5y ago

Huh, so untrue (or grossly exaggerated) results are more interesting, and that matters more for getting talked about than truth. Thank goodness our newsmedia business doesn't work that way, or we would be poorly-informed in multiple ways.

taneq 5y ago
Yep, basically. Very unexpected results are interesting and newsworthy and more likely wrong.
bloaf 5y ago
OR if someone is going to fabricate results, they fabricate them in a direction that they expect others will find interesting.

bonoboTP 5y ago

I mean, both strongly correlate with "surprising finding" so it's no surprise they correlate with each other too.

LetThereBeLight 5y ago

More specifically, this paper is focused on the social sciences. That's not to say that this isn't present in the basic sciences either. But one other thing to note here is that these headlines about a "replication crisis" seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Let's not forget the history of the electron charge. As Feynman said: "We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.27s_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...

lupire 5y ago
Feynman's examples is of people being more critical about certain issues. A better example is the case of "radiation" that could only be seen in a dark room in the corner of your eye, which turned out to be a human visual artifact and wishful thinking.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I assume you're thinking of N-Rays and Blondlot, but there is another phenomenon that more or less fits your description. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena It's interesting that according to the Wikipedia article it's not entirely certain whether the radiation is producing actual light or just the sensation of light.

bambam24 5y ago

Including this one

calkuta 5y ago

don't worry all the COVID related research is spot-on

ramblerman 5y ago

Pulling up the actual paper, there is an added part the article doesn't mention. > Prediction markets, in which experts in the field bet on the replication results before the replication studies, showed that experts could predict well which findings would replicate (11). So it's even stating that this isn't completely innocent, given different incentives most reviewers identify a suspicious study, but under current incentives it seems letting it through due to the novelty is somehow warranted.

abandonliberty 5y ago

This is almost a tautology. Unlikely/unexpected findings are more noteworthy, so they're more likely to be both cited and false, perhaps based on small sample sizes or p-hacking. People love this stuff. Malcolm Gladwell's made a career on it: half of the stuff he writes about is disproven before he publishes. It's very interesting that facial microexpressions analysis can predict relationship outcome with 90% certainty. Except it's just an overfit model, it can't, and he's no longer my favorite author. [0] Similarly, Thomas Erikson's "Surrounded by Idiots" also lacks validation. [1] Both authors have been making top 10 lists for years, and Audible's top selling list just reminded me of them. Similarly, shocking publications in Nature or Science are to be viewed with skepticism. I don't know what I can read anymore. It's the same with politics. The truth is morally ambiguous, time consuming, complicated, and doesn't sell. I feel powerless against market forces. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman#Critiques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman#Critiques [1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Z7JiCRI7s4J:https://soccermatics.medium.com/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1&vwsrc=0 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Z7JiC...

kjrose 5y ago

There is a really good reason for this. Everyone wants the shock value for the easy publication but no one wants to do the work to validate the original study because that can imply possibly being wrong. This is a major issue with the current model.

avivo 5y ago

If only we had a magical web of knowledge where updates could instantly be seen, and even propagate as we learn more about the world!

crazygringo 5y ago

> “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’” Obviously, because journals don't attempt replication, nor should they. A study will only have replication by another researcher/team after it's been published. Or not, in which case that's publishable as well. This is how science works and is supposed to work. The problem should rather be: why are journals accepting papers with citations to debunked papers that don't also cite the debunking papers? I've had plenty of friends have a paper get sent back for revisions because it was missing a newer citation. This should be a major responsibility of reviewers. So why aren't peer reviewers staying on top of the literature?

rscho 5y ago
> This should be a major responsibility of reviewers. So why aren't peer reviewers staying on top of the literature? Perhaps because reviewing is unpaid work, both in the financial and academic sense?
- crazygringo 5y ago
  I definitely don't disagree with that!

for_i_in_range 5y ago

They state the cause for replication being the "findings" in the papers "are interesting". Is this really the case? And is this actually a "new" phenomenon? It seems like it could be a disguised version of the Availability Cascade. [1] In other words, when we encounter a simple-to-understand explanation of something complex, the explanation ends up catching on. Then, because the explanation is simple, its popularity snowballs. The idea cascades like a waterfall throughout the public. Soon it becomes common sense—not because of sense, but because of common. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade

dmingod666 5y ago

This is Psychology. Psychology has lots of problems and those are not going away anytime soon. I think more deeper biological monitoring technology like fmri etc. will pave way to more robust studies other than that Don't have much hope..

tgv 5y ago
fMRI has been at the avant-garde of p-hacking since its inception. I'm the co-author of several fMRI papers, but not responsible for the actual analysis. That was done by a PhD student under supervision by the head of the institute, fairly influential in his field. The first experiment didn't yield "significant" results, not even after a few months of trying all the possible ways to manipulate the data, but the values were close to acceptable. But since there was no budget to run another experiment, it was decided to add 8 subjects more. And lo and behold, after a few more months of data wrangling, there were significant blobs, and the article was published. To add insult to injury: when subsequent experiments didn't give any interesting results, and the PhD didn't have enough material for graduation, they decided to split the data they already had by gene variants, because technology had just reached the point where that kind of analysis could be done by a sufficiently rich lab. And there was a new result! The original blob was now seen in two areas instead of one, depending on variant. Highly publishable. That that meant that the original finding was now invalidated wasn't even considered. edit: this took place between 2000 and 2010.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  agree, the sausage-making in science is ugly, but my point is if technology is more accessible, there will be some reliable data points to go by rather than kludging together some experimental premise and then making profound pronouncements. Then those findings are then parroted by everyone. Take for example a study done in about 2005 that said "willpower is an exhaustible resource" - They gave some participants some problems to solve - they were cooking cookies at that back so the participants could smell them. Later, half of the participants were given cucumbers and the other half cookies and then observed that people given cookies persisted for longer in solving the problems. This proved "willpower is an exhaustible resources". Is willpower exhaustible? what if the participants while they were giving up early where given an incentive of 500 USD to continue working on the same problem, would they work for much longer than the other group? why? willpower is an exhaustible resource, how can you draw from something that now no longer exists? would you then conclude that willpower can be depleted in humans, but humans have the ability to synthesize it from currency. Ofcorse thats ridiculous. Willpower and expended effort are context based and each person can set their own threshold of when its appropriate to give up - its partly a conscious decision. A few years later the authors of this same study walked back on their claims that "willpower is an exhaustible resource" ( it does not stop people from touting this around as reasoning for whatever point they are trying to make ). My point is bio-monitoring technology with probably VR will atleast give us some verifiable data-points..

tryonenow 5y ago

That the research is often of poor quality is a consequence partly of perverse incentives, but primarily because there is no incentive currently to replicate research. Give master's students at least the option of replicating research of a minimum quality/complexity. It would be an excellent exercise over the course of the degree, and these would still potentially count as citations for advisors. There would be fewer incentives to risk getting caught doing sloppy research, especially knowingly. But I guess some of the collective pride in academia would need to be swallowed first. I believe there is a certain obligation to dedicate resources to reproducing science, in that without affording as much, the institution itself will erode and eventually fail. In fact I think this has a lot to do with the fact that academia is in a far worse state than many people realize.

MavropaliasG 5y ago

Not surprised that this is in psychology and economics.

pabs3 5y ago

So when will journals start requiring a separate team has replicated the results before publication?

jollybean 5y ago

This may be an existential property of the Scientific Community: the more novel, the more interest, the more popularity ... but also the more likely to be untrue.

dash2 5y ago

It’s ironic, but 153 times is a crazily high figure. I’m suspicious.

RugnirViking 5y ago
yeah - I'd be surprised to learn that the average paper in their study had 153 citations regardless of other things. Perhaps they only looked at highly cited papers, but that induces its own issues.

eob 5y ago

I will never forget the day a postdoc in my lab told me not to continue wasting time trying (and failing) to reproduce [Top Institution]’s “Best Paper Award” results from the year prior. He had been there when the work was done and said they manipulated the dataset until they got the numbers they wanted. The primary author is now a hot shot professor. My whole perception of academia and peer review changed that day. Edit to elaborate: like many of our institutions, peer review is an effective system in many ways but was designed assuming good faith. Reviewers accept the author’s results on faith and largely just check to make sure you didn’t forget any obvious angles to cover and that the import of the work is worth flagging for the whole community to read. Since there’s no actual verification of results, it’s vulnerable to attack by dishonesty.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
Honest question: how do we fix this? The obvious solution, prosecuting academics, has an awful precedence attached to it.
- enriquto 5y ago
  at least in some parts of computer science the solution is easy: do not ever publish results without the public source code of all the experiments.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That isn't possible if you're using commercially licensed source from other people, drivers for scientific instruments, lacking copyright assignment for some of it, etc. Same reason many commercial projects can't be open sourced even if the company wanted to.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      So people who used proprietary software will not be able to publish. Sounds like a win-win to me!

qalmakka 5y ago

I worked in the academic world for two years. What I saw was that lots of people are under a constant pressure to publish, and quantity is often put above quality. I've seen papers without any sort of value or reason to exist being bruteforced through reviewing just to avoid some useless junk data of no value whatsoever being wasted, all to just add a line on someone's CV. This is without saying that some Unis are packed of totally incompetent people that only got to advance their careers by always finding a way to piggyback on someone else's paper. The worst thing I've seen is that reviewing papers is also often offloaded to newly graduated fellows, which are often instructed to be lenient when reviewing papers coming from "friendly universities". The level of most papers I have had the disgrace to read is so bad it made me want to quit that world as soon as I could. I got to the conclusion the whole system is basically a complex game of politics and strategy, fed by a loop in which bad research gets published on mediocre outlets, which then get a financial return by publishing them. This bad published research is then used to justify further money being spent on low quality rubbish work, and the cycle continues. Sometimes you get to review papers that are so comically bad and low effort they almost feel insulting on a personal level. For instance, I had to reject multiple papers not only due their complete lack of content, but also because their English was so horrendous they were basically unintelligible.

TimPC 5y ago
Quality is definitely above quantity in academia in almost all disciplines. The issue is citation count is used as a proxy for quality and its a poor one in many respects.
morpheos137 5y ago
>English was so horrendous they were basically unintelligible. Maybe this is how the GPT "AI" can generate such similar results. Lol.

zhdc1 5y ago

Keep in mind that highly cited papers are usually first to their field on a particular subject, and it makes sense that they will be usually be less "accurate" simply because they don't have the luxury of building off of a direct line of prior research. The first Tesla Model S isn't anywhere as good as the current version, but it was still groundbreaking. Academic publications work the same way.

thaw13579 5y ago
I think the issue with this analogy is: the new and improved Tesla Model S is hugely popular and profitable, while the academic papers that later revisit and improve upon those initial (high impact but less accurate) findings receive little attention or grant support, and consequently the "inaccuracies" persist.

cycomanic 5y ago

I'm not really surprised about the results related to Nature (and Science to a lesser degree). I have seen it multiple times that Nature editors (who are not experts in the field) have overruled reviewer recommendations to reject, because the results were exciting. The incentives for Nature are not to produce great science, but to sell journals and that requires them to give the impression of being on the forefront of "scientific discovery". I've in fact been told by an editor "our job is to make money, not great science)". The irony is that their incentives also make them very risk averse, so they will not publish results which don't have a buzz around them. I know of several papers which created new "fields" which were rejected by the editors. The incentive also results in highly cited authors having an easier time to get published in Nature. I should say that this is typically much better in the journals run by expert editors, published by the technical societies like e.g. IEEE.

maxnoe 5y ago

"We failed to reproduce the results published in [1]" is a citation. "Our findings directly contradict [1]" is a citation. Without context, number of citations doesn't tell you anything.

mike_hearn 5y ago
Negative citations are extremely rare. https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#or-Maybe-They-Don-39-t https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... "You might hypothesize that the citations of non-replicating papers are negative, but negative citations are extremely rare.5 One study puts the rate at 2.4%. Astonishingly, even after retraction the vast majority of citations are positive, and those positive citations continue for decades after retraction.6"

MAXPOOL 5y ago

Proposal: 1/ For best journals: a non-replication betting market for peer-reviewed and published papers. Grants to replicate papers that are highest in the betting pool. 2/ Citation index were citing and publishing a paper that does not replicate lowers the score. (This should be first used in machine learning research)

mjburgess 5y ago
That would work well if you could connect payouts to teams showing fail/pass on replication; ie., so there was funding available for replication.

zby 5y ago

It is not just research: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood

mjburgess 5y ago
> Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. - wiki > At a global scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times: this has been epitomized as “Littlewood’s Law: in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” This must now be extended to a global scale for a hyper-networked global media covering anomalies from 8 billion people—all coincidences, hoaxes, mental illnesses, psychological oddities, extremes of continuums, mistakes, misunderstandings, terrorism, unexplained phenomena etc. Hence, there will be enough ‘miracles’ that all media coverage of events can potentially be composed of nothing but extreme outliers, even though it would seem like an ‘extraordinary’ claim to say that all media-reported events may be flukes.
- TimPC 5y ago
  For this to be true a person has to experience a large number of events. For any meaningful definition of event that's false. So clearly this law requires an event to be routine in some extreme way in order for enough of them to occur that these outliers are hit. So maybe my miracle for this month is I take a breath that is 1/1,000,000 in how unusually large it is.
  - zby 5y ago
    It is about media - the interned and other media are gathering all the outliers and reporting on them - it is not that a person experiences now more events than he used to before the internet.

ta8645 5y ago

Until this is fixed, people need to stop saying "listen to The Science", in an attempt to convince others of a given viewpoint. Skeptical people already distrust our modern scientific institutions; not completely obviously, but definitely when they're cited as a cudgel. Continued articles like this should make everyone stop and wonder just how firm the supposed facts are, behind their own favoured opinions. We need a little more humility about which scientific facts are truly beyond reproach.

TimPC 5y ago
We also need to listen to the science on things that are clearly established. The replication crisis is not something that affects almost anything in public debate. Evolution is well established science. Large parts of Climate Change are well established science. Etc.
- ta8645 5y ago
  And your evidence for that is what exactly? Since this replication problem is already known to appear in multiple disciplines, it's quite likely that the same misconduct is happening in other areas too. I think you're being a little too quick to hope that it doesn't affect those areas where you have a vested interest.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    There is small but non-zero chance that any given paper on climate change is wrong or fraudulent, but it is absurd to go from that to claiming that we should disregard literally all scientific research that has ever been done. At a certain point you have to accept basic truths like that 2+2=4, or that the earth revolves around the sun, or that the composition of the atmosphere impacts our climate
- throwkeep 5y ago
  Yea, evolution and climate change are pretty solid. But the projected models do no favor to climate science. Those are bogus. They've mostly been wrong in the past and will be mostly wrong again in the future. There are way too many variables and unknowns, and those accumulate the further out the model reaches.

admissionsguy 5y ago

When I started a PhD in a biomedical field at a top institution, we were told that our results are not that important; what's important is the ability to "sell them". This focus on presentation over content permeated the whole establishment. I remember sitting with a professor trying to come up with plausible buzzwords for a multi-million grant application. The phenomenon described in the articles sounds like a natural consequence of this attitude.

anshumankmr 5y ago

There was a comment I read somewhere (not sure where exactly) but they stated that the modern peer review process would never let someone like Einstein who was a patent clerk ever get the limelight.

TimPC 5y ago

Here is an idea: Replication based grants. Have some portion of academic funding distributed by assigning a pool of money to grantors and having them bet portions of that money on papers they consider impactful AND likely to replicate. Allow the authors to use the money on any research they want. This lets authors get some research money without writing costly and wasteful grant proposals. It takes advantage of the fact that experts in the field can generally tell which studies are likely to replicate (I'm assuming granting agencies can find experts in the field to do this).

amelius 5y ago

Holds for social media too. Posts less likely to be true are liked/reposted more.

alboaie 5y ago

If we embrace meta rationality, we could build tools and wisdom in our culture to sort out this problem.

amai 5y ago

Citations of replicated papers should be multiplied by a high factor to counter balance this effect.

api 5y ago

This is a special case of a more general problem. Inferior technologies very often win in our industry because they are better marketed as well. Marketing is a completely distinct and unrelated skill from doing.

tohnjitor 5y ago

But can THIS study be replicated?

solinent 5y ago

What is the likelihood of this study being true? Will it be cited a lot now?

brockf 5y ago

This is most likely due to a selection process that favors either newsworthiness or trustworthiness. It’s a statistical artifact, see e.g. https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath/status/1396040993175126018?s=21 https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath/status/1396040993175126018?s...

sjg007 5y ago

I think it’s also true about the most upvoted comments. Any article you read on any forum the top comments always seem to be mistaken.

kingsuper20 5y ago

It would be super interesting to compare the quality of equivalent types of papers coming from academia vs. corporate sources.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fastaguy88 5y ago

The paper implies that less reproducible papers have a greater influence on science because they are more highly cited. But an alternate explanation suggests the opposite -- less reproducible papers are more highly cited because people are publishing papers pointing out the results are false. It is also quite telling that the biggest differences in citation counts are for papers published in Nature and Science. But in discipline specific journals (Figs. 1B,C), the effect is very modest. Practicing scientists know that Science and Nature are publish the least reproducible results, in part because they like "sexy" (surprising, less likely to be correct) science, and in part because they provide almost no detail on how experiments were performed (no Materials and Methods). The implication of the paper is that less reproducible science has more impact than reproducible science. But we know this is wrong -- reproducible results persist, while incorrect results do not (we haven't heard much more about the organisms that use arsenic rather than phosphorus in their DNA -- https://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163 )

splithalf 5y ago

This seems really obvious. People demand citations for bold claims, precisely because those claims are hard to believe. The problem is that some fields don’t do replication studies. In such fields these highly cited papers with dubious findings are never debunked, because you know economists to pick on one specific group, don’t do replication studies.

anigbrowl 5y ago

This is the big problem with the 'marketplace of ideas' and the notion that better education and dialog will fix everything. In a small marketplace, like a farmer's market, that's true. Also, markets based on a fungible commodity work OK as long as there's standardization of the product and conditions of perfect competition or something close to them obtain. But in most marketplaces advertising is a dominant force, and advertising power is not a function of product quality; you can market a bad product successfully. There are standards of truth in advertising, but they're loose and poorly enforced, the burden of evaluation falls on the consumer. Additionally, tribalist behavior builds up around products to a certain extent, as buyers of product X who dislike hearing it's good or crap push back on such claims, for varying reasons. Where these differences are purely aesthetic that doesn't matter much, but where they're functional a objectively better product can lose out against a one from a dishonest competitor or one with an irrationally loyal following. A problem for both producers and consumers is that it's more expensive to refute a false claim than to make it, so bad actors are incentivized to lie and lock int he advantage; it's arguably cheaper to apologize if caught out than to forgo the profitable behavior, as exemplified in the aphorism 'it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.' We see the results with problems like the OP and also in things like debates about public health, vaccine safety, climate change, and many other political issues. It's profitable to lie, a significant number of people have no problem doing it, the techniques of doing so have been repeatedly refined and weaponized, and those who rely on or simply prefer truth end up at a significant economic disadvantage. don't make the mistake of thinking this is problem confined to the niche world of academic journals.

couly 5y ago

A lifetime ago I worked on this project: https://cfr.pub/forthcoming/chang-li-2018.pdf https://cfr.pub/forthcoming/chang-li-2018.pdf The experience ucompletely unraveled my faith in academia.

morpheos137 5y ago

Almost certainly this has to do with popular or cherished narratives about reality increasingly diverging from reality. I have seen it here on HN over the past several years. HN used to be a place of thoughtful discussion. Now it is becoming increasingly politicised and redditified. To me it seems all our social structures are decaying. Even look at the language and how everything is faux hyperbole these days. People are forgetting how to think, how to write, how to reason all for the sake of the woke cultural revolution. The political correctness of thought is valued over the ontological correctness.

gumby 5y ago

I don’t mean to pick on one field in particular, but last year I made the throwaway comment to a FB post “arXiv is the new businesswire”. The number of academic “big shots” (friends of the poster, not of me) who “liked” the comment was a bit alarming. There’s too much incentive for fudging things (depending on your field, either grants or company funding). The degree of fraud in Chinese journals is high and well discussed (as it should be). But apart from a small amount of hand-wringing over “the replication crisis” there is no similar condemnation of the work in the rest of the world.