2013 discussion of how systemic biases in science, particularly medicine and psychology, have resulted in a research literature filled with false positives and exaggerated effects, called ‘the Replication Crisis’.
Long-standing problems in standard scientific methodology have exploded as the “Replication Crisis”: the discovery that many results in fields as diverse as psychology, economics, medicine, biology, and sociology are in fact false or quantitatively highly inaccurately measured. I cover here a handful of the issues and publications on this large, important, and rapidly developing topic up to about 201311ya, at which point the Replication Crisis became too large a topic to cover more than cursorily.
The crisis is caused by methods & publishing procedures which interpret random noise as important results, far too small datasets, selective analysis by an analyst trying to reach expected/desired results, publication bias, poor implementation of existing best-practices, nontrivial levels of research fraud, software errors, philosophical beliefs among researchers that false positives are acceptable, neglect of known confounding like genetics, and skewed incentives (financial & professional) to publish ‘hot’ results.
Thus, any individual piece of research typically establishes little. Scientific validation comes not from small p-values, but from discovering a regular feature of the world which disinterested third parties can discover with straightforward research done independently on new data with new procedures—replication.