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Previous by Date: Subject: [DCHAS-L] JOEH Latest Issue Contents - October 2013 Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:04:37 -0400 Author: "Secretary, ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety" |
Next by Date: Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] The Economist: Quantitative Research is Often Wrong Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:51:20 -0500 Author: Frankie Wood-Black |
"More and more, the crucial experimental procedures are buried in dense paragraphs available to the reader in supplementary documents. These supplementary files are often largely ignored by peer reviewers, meaning these important details are often published without critical review. This point is best demonstrated with a recently published Organometallics paper (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/om4000067), wherein the supplementary material describing the synthesis of an organometallic compound is published with the following statements: "please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…" These sentences passed through both the peer review process and an internal review by the editors handling this particular paper without correction."
Quantitative Research is Often Wrong
The Economist has a nice analysis of the high probability of wrong quantitative results being published in academic journals. In one example, cancer researchers tried to replicate 53 published studies but could only confirm the findings from 6. In another example, pharmaceutical researchers only got the same result a quarter of the time when repeating 67 so-called "seminal" studies.
The article has a helpful visualization of the statistical outcome of 1,000 research studies under fairly reasonable assumptions: 125 of the studies would be published, containing 80 correct results and 45 wrong results. The remaining 875 studies would have a much higher accuracy rate of 97%, but because they didn't find anything interesting they would not be published. Because of this publication bias, only 64% of published results would be true, in this example, despite following research protocols that produced good accuracy among all (published, as well as non-published) studies.
Ralph Stuart, CIHChemical Hygiene Officer
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