How to Make More Published Research True
John P. A. Ioannidis mail
Published: October 21, 2014
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747
Citation: Ioannidis JPA (2014) How to Make More Published Research True. PLoS Med 11(10): e1001747. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747
Published: October 21, 2014
Copyright: © 2014 John P. A. Ioannidis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The funders had no role in the decision to publish or in the preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: JPAI is a member of the Editorial Board of PLOS Medicine. The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Provenance: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed
Summary Points
Currently, many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85% of research resources are wasted.
To make more published research true, practices that have improved credibility and efficiency in specific fields may be transplanted to others which would benefit from them—possibilities include the adoption of large-scale collaborative research; replication culture; registration; sharing; reproducibility practices; better statistical methods; standardization of definitions and analyses; more appropriate (usually more stringent) statistical thresholds; and improvement in study design standards, peer review, reporting and dissemination of research, and training of the scientific workforce.
Selection of interventions to improve research practices requires rigorous examination and experimental testing whenever feasible.
Optimal interventions need to understand and harness the motives of various stakeholders who operate in scientific research and who differ on the extent to which they are interested in promoting publishable, fundable, translatable, or profitable results.
Modifications need to be made in the reward system for science, affecting the exchange rates for currencies (e.g., publications and grants) and purchased academic goods (e.g., promotion and other academic or administrative power) and introducing currencies that are better aligned with translatable and reproducible research.
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