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Modern science is empirical, right? If a study is published, and peer-reviewed, you can count on it, right? Not so fast. let me introduce you to the replication crisis. Thread 
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Did you know that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or produce? Legitimate journals are filled with peer-reviewed studies that include plagiarism, falsified results, conflicts of interest, and un-reproducable experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repl...
Ex-Stanford PhD scientist and researcher Elisabeth Bik ( @MicrobiomDigest) "sifts through the scientific literature for the subtle visual fingerprints of misconduct." https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2019/02/12/the-western-blot-vigilante/">https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2019/02/1...
"She has identified more than a thousand fraudulent images, and her work has led at least one journal to change the way it screens submissions."
"When a journal asks an author about these things, most authors try to dismiss it. They might say they accidentally uploaded the wrong image. Or like, & #39;we created a placeholder images and forgot to replace them with the real ones& #39;. You know: the dog ate my homework."
When journals are made aware of problems with a study, sometimes they retract it. Sometimes they augment with a correction. Sometimes they will not want to put pressure on a notable scientist who brings in a lot of money.
Check out this thread of Elisabeth Bik doing forensic analysis on papers in peer-reviewed journals: https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/1013282997519278080">https://twitter.com/Microbiom...
Psychology as a field is particularly affected by this phenomenon. In 2015, Open Science Collaboration tried to reproduce 100 studies in psychological science from three top journals. 36% of the replications yielded significant findings compared to 97% of the original studies.
One Princeton University psychologist called critics of psychology studies "adversaries", "methodological terrorists" and "self-appointed data police", claiming that criticism of psychology should only be expressed in private or through contacting the journals.
In 2012, Glenn Begley, biotech consultant, and Lee Ellis, University of Texas, published a paper arguing that only 11% of pre-clinical cancer studies could be replicated.
An initative called Many Labs was put together to reckon with this foundational crisis, and set out to replicate scientific papers across fields, en masse.
Many Labs 2 tackled psychology. "Overall, 14 of the 28 findings failed to replicate despite the massive sample size, with more than 60 laboratories contributing samples from all over the world to test each finding."
There is an incredible amount of heart, competence, accomplishment, and genius in scientific fields, but like any human endeavour, there is conflict of interest, protection of interests, gatekeeping and outright fraud. Don& #39;t be afraid to question.
