Abstract
There has been an increasing concern in both the scientific and lay communities that most published medical findings are false. But what does it mean to be false? Here we describe the range of definitions of false discoveries in the scientific literature. We summarize the philosophical, statistical, and experimental evidence for each type of false discovery. We discuss common underpinning problems with the scientific and data analytic practices and point to tools and behaviors that can be implemented to reduce the problems with published scientific results.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 109-122 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application |
Volume | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 7 2017 |
Keywords
- False discoveries
- Meta-analysis
- Reliability research
- Replicability
- Reproducibility
- Science-wise false discovery rate
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistics and Probability
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty