Avoiding bad science II
A student may ask us:
Are there any websites that offer advice about avoiding bad science?
Our reply:
Yes. Try Sense about Science.
As its website explains:
Sense about Science is an independent charity that challenges misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life. We advocate openness and honesty about research, and ensure the public interest in sound science and evidence is recognised in public debates and policymaking.
Sense about Science has another website, Ask For Evidence.
Both of these are directed to students and young scientists. If a student has seen a claim about a new scientific discovery and would like it to be checked, the information can be submitted online at the Ask For Evidence website.
Anyone submitting a claim to be checked should include such information as the type of claim, a picture of the claim if available, where and when the claim was seen or heard, and who made it. Sense About Science has contacted several companies that have used bad science to make false claims about different products.
If the student wonders:
What happens if I am not sure whether a scientific claim is correct or not?
We may explain:
If a scientific study has a small sample size, then its results may not apply to the larger population.
Another example is if two things happen independently, bad science will try to tell us that that one thing causes the other. Often bad science uses long, impressive-sounding words to try to convince us, especially in places like advertisements for cosmetics and other products.
As the Sense About Science website notes,
Scientists conduct research to test theories about how things work. The research is usually carried out at a scientific institute or university. Scientists carry out experiments, collect and examine results, and reach conclusions about whether their theory is right or wrong. They will often present their initial findings to other experts at conferences for discussion and debate. Scientists will write a paper to describe exactly what they did, and what they found out. The papers are then submitted to academic journals (for example Nature or the British Medical Journal) to be reviewed by experts (called peer review) and published for others to read. A scientific paper will have a title, list the scientists who carried out the study (the authors), and name the journal it was published in. You might be looking at something that references scientific research, even if it isn’t the paper itself (for example, a newspaper article, sales brochure or blog post). A full reference to a scientific paper usually looks like this:
Fellers J H and Fellers G M (1976) Tool use in a social insect and its implications for competitive interactions. Science , 192, 70-72. … or this: Hedenfalk I, Duggan D, Chen Y, et al. Gene-expression profiles in hereditary breast cancer. N Engl J Med , 2001; 344: 539-48.
A newspaper article might say something like ‘the research was carried out by scientists at the University of Edinburgh’ or ‘the research was published in The Plant Journal’. If an article doesn’t seem to reference scientific research at all, that’s not a good start!
The point is that if research is referred to, but not a specific article or book, then it may be bad science, since no reliable publication ever accepted the research.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)