TogepiMain t1_j96nzsu wrote
Reply to comment by splork-chop in Review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s research, colleagues allege by ScoMoTrudeauApricot
Isn't it like, 1 in 3?
For the folks in the back: just because your experiment hasn't been replicated does not disprove your hypothesis. It might not even mean anything negative for your paper. There's lot of reasons why this can happen.
What matters at the end of the day is you can find multiple studies that show with hard data that your hypothesis carries weight. These days, that doesn't really even need to mean they show "statistical significance", just that the data as a whole all lends weight to the same idea. Lots of studies can even be found hard to replicate because they are pinholed into showing these statistical values that often don't truly represent the data as a whole.
As u/magic1623 is basically saying: failure to replicate comes from loads and loads of reasons, but not from falsified data, really. That's an entirely different problem that anyone reading the paper, or trying to recreate it, would quickly see bad maths, padded sig figs, generous rounding, truly faked stuff just to get the result you want.
There's nothing inherently nefarious about a paper you can't replicate, and there's not even inherently anything wrong with that paper. But if it's noticed that you just straight up lied to show what you needed the paper to show, that's a huge fucking issue.
yxwvut t1_j97u1vl wrote
Are you familiar with p-hacking, or what some statisticians call the “garden of forked paths”? There are so many researcher degrees of freedom that go unreported and unconsidered. So much of academia is essentially encouraged to go on fishing expeditions until their data turns up something “significant”, and they probably don’t even have the statistics training to realize they’re doing unsound analysis.
TogepiMain t1_j984icn wrote
https://www.cos.io/initiatives/prereg
Pre register your paper! Calling your shot in science, so hot right now.
Seriously, millions and millions of dollars are wasted every year on repeated dead ends. Your paper showing hoe the thing you did didn't work? It is just as valuable. Sharing your mistakes is incredibly brave, and incredibly important. Every scientist that comes after you is able to reach further because you showed them where not to stray from the path.
yxwvut t1_j986j0k wrote
Preregistration is great but even pre-registering isn’t a panacea. Pre-registered papers can still be silently dropped from publication so the macro paper-generating process still has an over-abundance of false positives if the negatives are dropped, and there can still be ambiguities in the analysis protocol where researchers can still impart influence over the results.
TogepiMain t1_j9a6btk wrote
True. But even if the paper isn't published the timestamp of the hypothesis is there
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