WRONG SCIENCE IS MORE POPULAR

According to a University of California, San Diego, study, scientific papers that are wrong are more likely to be read and cited in other papers than those that are correct. They looked at papers published in leading psychology, economic and nature/science journals to see how many were successfully repeated to verify the results and found that only 39 per cent of 100 psychology papers were successfully replicated. In economics, the replication rate was 61 per cent, and 62 per cent among nature/science studies. What they also discovered was that the ‘wrong’ papers got a lot of attention at the time of publication, with nature/science papers that could not be verified getting cited 300 times more than the verified ones. They concluded that this is probably because journals are likely to favour unverified studies if they have eye-catching, media friendly results. These generate a lot of interest when they appear but follow-up studies showing they are not verifiable do not get the same attention. As a result, papers where the science cannot be verified often continue to be cited by other researchers for years after their results have been shown to be impossible to repeat and so are likely to be wrong. [UPI] 25 May 2021.