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

by Stuart Ritchie

A 2016 survey of over 1,500 researchers – though admittedly not a properly representative one, since it just involved those who filled in a questionnaire on the website of the journal Nature – found that 52 per cent thought there was a ‘significant crisis’ of replicability. A further 38 per cent believed there was, in a somewhat peculiar turn of phrase, at least a ‘slight crisis’.69 Nearly 90 per cent of chemists said that they’d had the experience of failing to replicate another researcher’s result; nearly 80 per cent of biologists said the same, as did almost 70 per cent of physicists, engineers, and medical scientists. Only a slightly lower percentage of scientists said they’d had trouble in replicating their own results. Because the study wasn’t a proper poll, and scientists who were already worried about replicability were probably more likely to complete it, these numbers will be somewhat exaggerated. But they do tell us that there are widespread concerns about just how much of the scientific literature, including even the research we’ve done ourselves, we can trust.