Senior Researcher at SBA Research, Management and Resilience/Sustainability Consulting and Project Development
Severe quality problems are found in all scientific fields now. A rather recent study in ecology (Nature) is shocking, but unfortunately not surprising: “In many scientific disciplines, common research practices have led to unreliable and exaggerated evidence about scientific phenomena” “In an analysis of over 350 studies published between 2018 and 2020, we detect empirical evidence of exaggeration bias and selective reporting of statistically significant results. This evidence implies that the published effect sizes in ecology journals exaggerate the importance of the ecological relationships that they aim to quantify.” Kaitlin Kimmel et al, Empirical evidence of widespread exaggeration bias and selective reporting in ecology, Nature Ecology (2023) https://lnkd.in/diR_3QHE
Senior Researcher at SBA Research, Management and Resilience/Sustainability Consulting and Project Development
9moActually, the situation is even worse than it looks, because all 350 articles that were studied were published in rather high ranking journals including Science and Nature. So this bad result is a bad result including only the best articles in the field. It is looking at the tip of the iceberg. What would happen, if you include a wider range of articles and conferences...