An important part of conducting sound science involves interpreting data correctly. Unfortunately, we don’t do that very well. For example, we are fooled by regression to the mean, we report findings when there are none, and we are overconfident about statistical power and significance. As scientists and lay persons, we want to be certain about research findings. But statistics only
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Many medical and scientific questions are the sort that cannot be answered using randomised study designs. For example, Does cigarette smoking cause lung cancer?, What is the risk hip fracture in adults?, and Do rats indirectly destroy coral reefs? Scientists often use observational cohort studies to answer these types of questions. In cohort studies, (1) a sample of subjects or
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In our previous post we learned how to find an appropriate LaTeX template to write a scientific article. To illustrate how simple it is to download and start working with one of these templates, I used the example of preparing a paper for one of the PLOS journals. In this post we are going to add a little content to
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The pressure to publish and current incentives that reward highly-cited discoveries leads to research findings that are not reproducible and inadvertently results in the natural selection of bad science. It is difficult to encourage scientists to take effort in conducting reproducible and rigorous research without better incentives. What kinds of metrics and incentives might reward scientists for conducting sound science?
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Scientifically Sound 