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

by Stuart Ritchie

a more comprehensive study took a random sample of 268 biomedical papers, including clinical trials, and found that all but one of them failed to report their full protocol. Meaning that, once again, you’d need additional details beyond the paper even to try to replicate the study.53 Another analysis found that 54 per cent of biomedical studies didn’t even fully describe what kind of animals, chemicals or cells they used in their experiment.54 Let’s take a moment to think about how odd this is. If a paper only provides a superficial description of a study, with necessary details only appearing after months of emailing with the authors (or possibly being lost forever), what was the point of writing it in the first place? Going back at least to Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century, recall that the original, fundamental motivation for scientists reporting all the specifics of their studies was so that others could scrutinise, and try to replicate, their research. The papers here failed that elementary test, just as the journals that published them also failed to perform their basic critical function.