A 2005 article by the meta-scientist John Ioannidis carried the dramatic title ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, and its mathematical model concluded just that: once you consider the many ways that scientific studies can go wrong, any given claim in a scientific paper is more likely to be false than true.70 The article may have attracted a great deal of attention and discussion, being cited over 800 times in the first five years after its publication, but in terms of scientists starting to make the necessary changes to improve the quality of research, its Cassandra-like
...more
