You are correct - it was not a study, since that would require studying some empirical data instead of making up values. It was actually an essay, akin to a gue

You are correct - it was not a study, since that would require studying some empirical data instead of making up values. It was actually an essay, akin to a guest blog post, but for a journal [0]. Look at his paper - it clearly relies on values that he made up - there is not a single measurement of actual papers to fill in his formulas. What he did was show it was possible for stuff to be wrong, given values he pulled out the air. When people did studies to measure those values from real papers, which Ioannidis did not, they found his made up values far from reality. For example, this paper shows how to do actual measurements of the values Ioannidis made up [1]. Here's one [2] (of many) paper showing that Ioannidis did not prove the claim people think he did for other reasons. Carefully read the actual original paper, and note that there are many values to input to his model, that he hand waves over and does not actually measure. [0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124&xid=17259,15700019,15700186,15700190,15700248 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [1] https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.3718.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.3718.pdf [2] https://econpapers.repec.org/article/plopmed00/0040168.htm https://econpapers.repec.org/article/plopmed00/0040168.htm