Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

There’s a straightforward, but devastating, reason for this persistent positivity: scientists choose whether to publish studies based on their results. In a perfect world, the methodology of a study would be all that matters: if everyone agrees it’s a good test of its hypothesis, from a well-designed piece of research, it gets published. This would be a true expression of the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness, where scientists are supposed to care not about their specific results (the very idea of having a ‘pet theory’ is an affront to this norm) but just the rigour with which they’re investigated. That’s far from the reality, however. Results that support a theory are written up and submitted to journals with a flourish; disappointing ‘failures’ (which is how null results are often seen) are quietly dropped, the scientists moving on to the next study. And it isn’t just the researchers themselves: journal editors and reviewers also make the decision to accept and publish papers according to how interesting the findings appear, not necessarily how meticulous the researchers have been in discovering them. This feeds back to the scientists themselves and the whole thing becomes a vicious circle: why bother submitting your null paper for publication if it has a negligible chance of being accepted? This is publication bias. It’s also known, now anachronistically, as the ‘file-drawer problem’ – since that’s where scientists are said to be keeping all their null results, hidden...