Science is hard work. So hard, in fact, that it's pretty disheartening to hear that much of that effort is wasted. A major series of research papers was published yesterday in The Lancet documenting five major causes of waste in research (if you're interested, the culprits include inefficiencies in setting research priorities, inappropriate study design and analysis, problems in research regulation and management, a lack of accessibility of research results and incomplete or unusable reporting of data).
Stanford's John Ioannidis, MD, DSci, who has studied the subject extensively, co-authored the accompanying commentary and the article "How to Increase Value When Research Priorities are Set." He is also the first author of "Increasing Value and Reducing Waste in Research Design, Conduct and Analysis." (Stanford health research and policy experts Rob Tibshirani, PhD, and Mark Hlatky, MD, are senior and co-author, respectively, of the article.)
It's not all doom and gloom, however. The series does suggest ways to overcome these seemingly pervasive obstacles. From the opening article:
How might things be different? One protection from these distorting drivers would be the creation of a set of balancing counter-influences. So, instead of being judged on the basis of the impact factors of the journals in which their work is published, academics might be judged on the methodological rigour and full dissemination of their research, the quality of their reports, and the reproducibility of their findings. If these factors were to contribute substantially to promotion, funding, and publication decisions, institutions might even go so far as to audit the performance of their staff and, when substandard, pay more attention to continuation of professional development and appraisal of the research workforce.
Previously "U.S. effect" leads to publication of biased research, says Stanford's John Ioannidis, Shaky evidence moves animal studies to humans, according to Stanford-led study and Neuroscience studies often underpowered, say researchers at Stanford, Bristol
