Make journals report clinical trials properly
It&#x27;s always interesting to look at past ages through the lens of the modern age. I wonder if, decades or centuries from now, the misuse of statistics and inadequate up-front documentation of research methods in science will be seen as a great scientific scandal, or scientific failure, of the 20th and 21st centuries. We should have known better, but many of us failed in these basic ways.<p>An NPR episode of Planet Money covered the &quot;Experiment Experiment&quot;: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;money&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;15&#x2F;463237871&#x2F;episode-677-the-experiment-experiment" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;money&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;15&#x2F;463237871&#x2F;episo...</a> and described how the Reproducibility Project was unable to successfully produce a significant percent of studies that they undertook to reproduce. There is legitimate concern that data-dredging leads to misunderstanding or misrepresenting of results; and even if some of the studies are valid science, it&#x27;s clear that the documentation of the studies do not suffice to allow others to replicate it, which is the bedrock of science.<p>The episode above also discussed a number of psychological fallacies and errors that experimenters make. Imagine that you begin a study of 200 people, measuring some variable. You see promising results, so you decide to extend the study and add more people; you test another 100 people.<p>By adding 100 more people to your study, have you <i>increased</i> or <i>decreased</i> the likelihood that your results were due to statistical chance? Counter-intuitively, the answer is that you have <i>increased</i> the odds that the result was due to chance. You cannot add or remove people to a study while it is in progress, based on preliminary results in the study, without impacting its statistical validity in important ways.<p>These and other changes that experimenters make during the course of an experiment create a great risk of conducting bad science. I for one support any effort to encourage all research studies and methods to be declared ahead of time.