Reddit reviews Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions
We found 2 Reddit comments about Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
BASIC
https://www.amazon.com/Rigor-Mortis-Science-Worthless-Billions/dp/0465097901
This book is a must read. Essentially, the way that academic research is set up, is that you have to “publish or perish,” so there are lots of people out there who either intentionally or unintentionally publish sloppy work.
Failure to reproduce a finding could be for a plethora of reasons, so it's not that simple (and believe me, I wish it was!). If one group cannot reproduce a finding, it doesn't mean that the finding is immediately false and needs to be redacted. There are often technical reasons and experimental details that account for the difference, but it takes some effort from both parties to parse these out. Further, it's still incredibly difficult to get people motivated to take the time to write a manuscript and publish negative data, when they just want to move onto a new project instead.
As far as we're aware, lying and straight up malice are very small contributors to the reproducibility issue. I recommend reading Rigor Mortis to expand on much of this.