Science Forum: How failure to falsify in high-volume science contributes to the replication crisis
- Pennsylvania State University, United States
- Center for Open Science, United States
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.
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Timothy M Errington
Funding
The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
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© 2022, Rajtmajer et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Science Forum: How failure to falsify in high-volume science contributes to the replication crisis
eLife 11:e78830.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78830
