Is biomedical research self-correcting? Modelling insights on the persistence of spurious science

Abstract

The reality that volumes of published biomedical research are not reproducible is an increasingly recognized problem. Spurious results reduce trustworthiness of reported science, increasing research waste. While science should be self-correcting from a philosophical perspective, that in insolation yields no information on efforts required to nullify suspect findings or factors shaping how quickly science may be corrected. There is also a paucity of information on how perverse incentives in the publishing ecosystem favouring novel positive findings over null results shape the ability of published science to self-correct. Knowledge of factors shaping self-correction of science remain obscure, limiting our ability to mitigate harms. This modelling study introduces a simple model to capture dynamics of the publication ecosystem, exploring factors influencing research waste, trustworthiness, corrective effort and time to correction. Results from this work indicate that research waste and corrective effort are highly dependent on field-specific false positive rates and time delays to corrective results to spurious findings are propagated. The model also suggests conditions under which biomedical science is self-correcting and those under which publication of correctives alone cannot stem propagation of untrustworthy results. Finally, this work models a variety of potential mitigation strategies, including researcher- and publisher-driven interventions.