How Bias Is Ruining Scientific Research

In 2005, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," the most downloaded paper ever in the Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS. Not incidentally, he has also become notorious for his minority views on COVID, including criticisms of case prediction models and the efficacy of lockdowns.

Just as "If it bleeds it leads" in the popular media, you'll probably get a lot more attention if you say something cures cancer than if you say it's a dead end - never mind that reaching and publishing dead ends is a vital part of science.

In economics, 61 percent of the 18 studies replicated, as did 62 percent of the 21 studies published in Nature and Science.

You can tell just by the name that Nature Climate Change is pretty high up in that more prestigious publications tend to have shorter names, even to a point of going to acronyms to gain prestige as with The Journal of the American Medical Association becoming JAMA. Sure enough, popular media such as France 24 picked up on the paper with "Global Warming Blamed For 1 In 3 Heat-Related Deaths," as did popular science media like NewScience "Climate Change To Blame For 37% of World's Heat-Related Deaths," and so did lots of medical and science journals.

How much that's been published in medical and science journals on that has been replicated or in any case is trustworthy? Probably the single greatest "Should-be" issue with COVID is the "Died from" and "Died with" issue.

If the purpose of Science is science, it certainly was irresponsible - and only the latest in a huge series.

Another "Trick" suggested by one of the Rady School authors is to essentially distrust "Work that is more interesting or has been cited a lot." Or, as Stuart Ritchie declares in his 2020 book Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, "Let's make science boring again."
 

https://spectator.org/science-progress-publishing-journals/