WIKIMEDIA, ZINA DERETSKY, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION, AND ANNA BAUER“Science is a struggle for truth against methodological, psychological, and sociological obstacles,” wrote Daniele Fanelli and John Ioannidis in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report published this week (August 26). The pair presented evidence for this struggle after analyzing nearly 1,200 studies in 82 meta-analyses on biological and behavioral research. Overall, Fanelli and Ioannidis found that behavioral researchers are more likely to report extreme effects, and those in the US are more likely to skew extreme when study results suit their initial expectations.
Fanelli, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and Ioannidis, a Stanford University medical professor, called this tendency a “US effect.” They found that behavioral researchers from other countries might also end up with extreme findings, but not as often as those in the US. It’s not entirely clear why this observed bias might occur, nor why it seems more common in the US. “Whatever methodological choices are made, those made by researchers in the United States tend to yield subtly stronger supports for whatever hypothesis they test,” Fanelli told Nature. He and Ioannidis did not find similar patterns among studies in genetics meta-analyses.
The authors speculate that the culture of scientific publishing in the US nudges scientists to seek out methods that exaggerate ...
