Positive Quiddity: Scientific Skepticism

There’s a fascinating article published in 2005 that explains why most published research findings are false:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

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Wikipedia has done a profile on the study’s author:

John P. A. Ioannidis (born 1965 in New York City) is a professor and chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine.

　
He was born in 1965 and raised in Athens, Greece. He was Valedictorian of his class at Athens College, graduating in 1984. He graduated first in his class at the University of Athens Medical School, then attended Harvard University for his medical residency in internal medicine. He then did a fellowship at Tufts University for infectious disease.


Ioannidis's 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" has been the most downloaded technical paper from the journal PloS Medicine. This paper has met much approval, though Goodman and Greenland criticized it in a short comment and a longer analysis. Ioannidis has answered this critique.

A profile of his work in this area appears in the November 2010 issue of The Atlantic. The Atlantic article notes Ioannidis analyzed "49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years". And "Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._A._Ioannidis