{"id":2272,"date":"2010-04-22T07:58:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T11:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2272"},"modified":"2010-04-22T08:58:44","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T12:58:44","slug":"hypothesis-driven-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2272","title":{"rendered":"Hypothesis-driven research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today's Non Sequitur:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/Hypothesis.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/Hypothesis.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>There's certainly a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2006\/09\/21\/tobacco\">history<\/a> of funding from certain industry groups arguably distorting research goals and reported results. In the biomedical area, there have been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/society\/2003\/dec\/07\/health.businessofresearch\">several recent scandals<\/a> in which \"scientists\" (well, doctors anyhow) apparently did nothing but put their name on papers prepared for them by interested companies.<\/p>\n<p>A more insidious danger is the \"<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File_drawer_effect\">file drawer effect<\/a>\", which is a result of the natural tendency to publish only \"interesting\" results. This is one of the reasons, according to John Ioannidis, \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC1182327\/\">Why Most Published Research Findings Are False<\/a>\".<\/p>\n<p>But maybe <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/54\/\">a little xkcd<\/a> is needed for balance here&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/ScienceWorks.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p>[And in comparison to <a href=\"http:\/\/headsuptheblog.blogspot.com\/2010\/04\/question-cyberbegging-at-post.html\">our punditocracy<\/a>, even the darkest corners of the scientific literature shine pretty bright.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today's Non Sequitur:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-in-the-funny-papers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}