“If medical research is hopelessly flawed, Ioannidis is the superhero poised to save it. For the past two decades, the physician-academic has used meta-research — or research on research — to document the ways science veers away from the truth by way of bias, error, and outright fraud…
There are papers showing that, if you look at a large number of these studies, only about 10 to 25 percent of them could be reproduced by other investigators. Animal research has also attracted a lot of attention and has had a number of empirical evaluations, many of them showing that almost everything that gets published is claimed to be "significant". Nevertheless, there are big problems in the designs of these studies, and there’s very little reproducibility of results. Most of these studies don’t pan out when you try to move forward to human experimentation…
We need scientists to very specifically be able to filter [bad] studies. We need better peer review at multiple levels. Currently we have peer review done by a couple of people who get the paper and maybe they spend a couple of hours on it. Usually they cannot analyze the data because the data are not available – well, even if they were, they would not have time to do that. We need to find ways to improve the peer review process and think about new ways of peer review…
I think that one major gap is exactly education. Most scientists in biomedicine and other fields are mostly studying subject matter topics; they learn about subject matter rather than methods. I think that several institutions are slowly recognizing the need to shift back to methods and how to make a scientist better equipped in study design, understanding biases, in realizing the machinery of research rather than the technical machinery.”
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