TY - JOUR TI - How failure to falsify in high-volume science contributes to the replication crisis AU - Rajtmajer, Sarah M AU - Errington, Timothy M AU - Hillary, Frank G A2 - Rodgers, Peter VL - 11 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/08/08 SP - e78830 C1 - eLife 2022;11:e78830 DO - 10.7554/eLife.78830 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78830 AB - 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. KW - science forum KW - replication KW - open science KW - falsification KW - reproducibility KW - data science JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -