This is very much a part of a larger pattern. See, for example, Andrew Gelman's blog: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia

This is very much a part of a larger pattern. See, for example, Andrew Gelman's blog: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/. He is as close to an expert in bad studies as there exists. Just scroll down, there will be many examples every week. Here's for example a second most recent post: The journal Public Choice goes the way of Lancet and publishes a paper that is “riddled with errors” but comes to a political conclusion that they want to support. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/04/03/the-journal-public-choice-goes-the-way-of-lancet-and-publishes-a-paper-that-is-riddled-with-errors-but-comes-to-a-political-conclusion-that-they-want-to-support/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/04/03/the-journa... Replication crisis in social science is a very real thing, and it's not a problem with a few odd studies: at this point, at least double digit percentage, if not outright majority of studies in social sciences, are simply untrue. Here's, for example, a quiz https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/ https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/, based on a study published in Nature ( https://www.nature.com/collections/nfkchhxllx https://www.nature.com/collections/nfkchhxllx ), which tried to replicate some 21 experimental studies published in Nature or Science in a few previous years. These were not some crappy papers published in pay-to-publish journals: Nature and Science are the top journals, as high quality as you can get. Still, only barely over a half of the studies replicated! In less renowned journals, the ratio must be even worse.