DailyDirt: Judging The Quality of Science

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The Scientific Method is often taught as a linear process that proceeds from hypothesis to theory. In practice, science -- like any other human endeavor -- can be much more haphazard. Science isn't perfect, but it has some built in processes for error correction to help weed out mistakes and outright fraud. There are some well-known issues with the traditional peer review mechanism, but science is adapting and coming up with new ways to improve its results and conclusions. Here are just a few links on judging the quality of science.

• The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford is planning to develop a meta-research institution to research... research. The new lab will be called METRICS for short, and it'll study factors like irreproducibility and publication bias. [url]
• Jimmy Wales has decided that no pseudo-science will be accepted for publication on Wikipedia. Wales says, "If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals -- that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately." [url]
• As more scientific research is done more globally, is the diversity of the researchers influencing the quality of the results? Some analysis suggests that papers with geographically diverse authors are better, in the metric of getting more citations. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: jimmy wales, meta-research, peer review, publication bias, reproducibility, science, wikipedia