학술논문

How failure to falsify in high-volume science contributes to the replication crisis
Document Type
Academic Journal
Source
eLife. August 8, 2022, Vol. 11
Subject
Popper, Karl
Language
English
ISSN
2050-084X
Abstract
The number of scientific papers published every year continues to increase, but scientific knowledge is not progressing at the same rate. Here we argue that a greater emphasis on falsification -- the direct testing of strong hypotheses -- would lead to faster progress by allowing well-specified hypotheses to be eliminated. We describe an example from neuroscience where there has been little work to directly test two prominent but incompatible hypotheses related to traumatic brain injury. Based on this example, we discuss how building strong hypotheses and then setting out to falsify them can bring greater precision to the clinical neurosciences, and argue that this approach could be beneficial to all areas of science.
Byline: Sarah M Rajtmajer, Timothy M Errington, Frank G Hillary Background and motivation The 'replication crisis' in various areas of research has been widely discussed in journals over the past [...]