Nature News Feature: How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop

Humans are remarkably good at self-deception. But growing concern about reproducibility is driving many researchers to seek ways to fight their own worst instincts.

Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results, says statistician John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The issue goes well beyond cases of fraud. Earlier this year, a large project that attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies managed to reproduce only slightly more than one-third². In 2012, researchers at biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, reported that they could replicate only 6 out of 53 landmark studies in oncology and haematology³. And in 2009, Ioannidis and his colleagues described how they had been able to fully reproduce only 2 out of 18 microarray-based gene-expression studies⁴.

Read the fully story at:

http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20151008&spMailingID=49730097&spUserID=NDg3Mjc3MjM4MzcS1&spJobID=781102586&spReportId=NzgxMTAyNTg2S0