Why most published research findings are false (2005)
This was a very controversial paper when it was published, perhaps because of its incendiary title. But the paper is much more subtle than the title suggests.  Basically the idea is that if you try to test phenomena that are completely unexpected, your prior odds are low, so even if you get a positive result, there is a good chance the result is incorrect.  So there is a danger that by trying to ensure more correct results, scientists may avoid paradigm changing experiments, which would be a loss.<p>Follow up analysis by Jager and Leek (2014) <a href="https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/article/15/1/1/244509" rel="nofollow">https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/article/15/1/1/244509</a> suggests the false discovery rate is closer to 14% than 50%.