| Summary: | Scientific and medical journals are not the sort of places many mistakes are to be expected. Yet Emili García-Berthou and Carles Alcaraz, researchers at the University of Girona in Spain, have found that 38 percent of a sample of papers in "Nature," and a quarter of those sampled in the "British Medical Journal"--two of the world's most respected journals--contained one or more statistical errors. Not all of these errors led to erroneous conclusions, but the authors of the study reckon that four percent of the errors may have caused non-significant findings to be misrepresented as being significant. Of course, mistakes happen in the best-run organisations, and there is no suggestion that any of the errors observed was a deliberate fraud. But there do seem to have been rather a lot of them. One solution might be for researchers to publish raw data as well as statistical analysis and conclusions. The real answer, however, surely lies with the researchers themselves.
|
|---|