The most cited articles in top science journals turned out to be least likely to be repeatable. More likely they are funded for Politically Biased goals.

Posted by freedomforall 4 years, 1 month ago to Science
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Excerpt:
"When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting?

It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk.

And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science.

Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth.

A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more
The authors added that journals may feel pressure to publish interesting findings, and so do academics. For example, in promotion decisions, most academic institutions use citations as an important metric in the decision of whether to promote a faculty member.

This may be the source of the “replication crisis,” first discovered the early 2010s.

So much for the theory that peer reviewed journals are supposed to be the rigorous guardians of modern science."

The original study of this:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/conte...


All Comments

  • Posted by $ jbrenner 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    No offense, freedomforall, but I have way more to do than I can handle already. I have felt like Atlas for a long time, but the world balanced on my back is a lot bigger than it used to be.
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  • Posted by 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    Would you be interested in starting a web science magazine to try to get science back on track? I'm no scientist, but I am willing to help. I suspect there are other brave scientists and engineers (and probably some who would try to stop it.)
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    The selective editing and rewriting of history and science are keys to the looters' maintenance of power. Welcome to Germany of the 1930s, the entire history (especially the early history) of the Soviet Union as partly documented by Ayn Rand, the history of Communist China, and recently Chinese-enforced worldwide history, with paid off politicians that share many characteristics of Peter Keating and Mr. Lawson as helpful non-idiots and BLM activists as useful idiots.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    I spoke earlier this year at a free speech week event at my university. After giving a five minute intro on my program at https://fit.instructure.com/files/435..., I talked for a couple of minutes to kickstart the conversation on how I had been developing a hypothesis on how organ implant rejection and extreme disease are all cases of an overly aggressive proportional response to a disturbance, followed by an underwhelming integral reset response back to normal (Have you ever seen how long it takes for people with immune compromise to get over a cold?). Cancer is just the opposite. The immune system has too low a proportional response to the disturbance and too fast an integral reset response back to "normal". After having developed this hypothesis a couple of years ago, when I saw that hydroxychloroquine was successfully managing COVID cases, my hypothesis was confirmed. I started working on a patent related to my ideas and found, with some effort, evidence to support my hypothesis. A month later I couldn't find half of my references that I had saved on my computer, including a few already published papers. During the free speech debate, the local newspaper's science editor said that he could find no evidence contradicting what Dr. Fauci and the WHO were propagating, so during this Zoom event I showed an example of how one of my key references had been "scrubbed".

    Back in 1994 when I was a postdoc, my boss said that half of what gets published cannot be reproduced. I have long found that to be correct.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    I haven't taken government funding since reading Atlas Shrugged. The hard part of R&D without government funding is not the idea generation, but the sheer number of people that it takes to turn an idea into reality. Even though I have all of the necessary skills, I don't have the time to do it all myself.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 4 years, 1 month ago in reply to this comment.
    The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of changes to my university that I opposed pre-pandemic. My university isn't quite like Utah Institute of Technology yet, but we are definitely pared back to the point where becoming Utah Institute of Technology feels like a possibility
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  • Posted by Dobrien 4 years, 1 month ago
    Studies show that 97% of scientist agree with WHO is funding them.
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