ArticleRoyal Society open science2016
The natural selection of bad science.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 208 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
208 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Assessing the Evidential Value of Mental Fatigue and Exercise Research.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2023Pooled it
- Quantifying research waste in ecology.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Pooled it
- Call to increase statistical collaboration in sports science, sport and exercise medicine and sports physiotherapy.British journal of sports medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Promoting Replicability in Developmental Research Through Meta-analyses: Insights From Language Acquisition Research.Child development · 2018Pooled it
- Effect size and statistical power in the rodent fear conditioning literature - A systematic review.PloS one · 2018Pooled it
- The AHEPA EEG benchmark: setting the standard for machine learning in dementia diagnosis, a scoping review.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2026Article
- The scientific game : Strategic Behavior and Incentives in Science.EMBO reports · 2026Article
- In the current research landscape academic and scholarly journals have outlived their usefulness.Physical and engineering sciences in medicine · 2026Article
- AI-Directed Research and the Loss of Scientific Direction.International neurourology journal · 2026Article
- (Re)Integrating classical natural history approaches into contemporary field primatology: toward a more holistic understanding of primates.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Quantifying the prevalence and impact of overreaching causal claims in social science.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Why Radiomics Rarely Reaches the Clinic: Reproducibility, Validation, and Evidence Gap-A Critical Narrative Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Citation self-awareness for a fairer academic publishing landscape.Bioscience · 2026Review
- Scientific misconduct, questionable research practices, and research climate: empirical approaches to integrity problems.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Review
- Ten common mistakes that could ruin your enrichment analysis.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Symbolic scarcity and epistemic waste: a systems theory of academic publishing failure.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Review
- Open science practices in personality disorder journals.Personality disorders · 2026Article
- A framework for assessing the trustworthiness of scientific research findings.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The publish or perish, publish and perish, publish then perish, and now retract and perish cultures in academia.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Article
- Researcher awareness and submission practices to ethics committees in Saudi Arabia: a cross-sectional study.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
148 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing-no deliberate cheating nor loafing-by scientists, only that publication is a principal factor for career advancement. Some normative methods of analysis have almost certainly been selected to further publication instead of discovery. In order to improve the culture of science, a shift must be made away from correcting misunderstandings and towards rewarding understanding. We support this argument with empirical evidence and computational modelling. We first present a 60-year meta-analysis of statistical power in the behavioural sciences and show that power has not improved despite repeated demonstrations of the necessity of increasing power. To demonstrate the logical consequences of structural incentives, we then present a dynamic model of scientific communities in which competing laboratories investigate novel or previously published hypotheses using culturally transmitted research methods. As in the real world, successful labs produce more 'progeny,' such that their methods are more often copied and their students are more likely to start labs of their own. Selection for high output leads to poorer methods and increasingly high false discovery rates. We additionally show that replication slows but does not stop the process of methodological deterioration. Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.