Focus | Meaningless research
Wishing for new research system Half of all research published in the leading scientific journals is not reproducible and thus incorrect. Does this mean that the research is substandard? Or is this entirely as it should be? We should be better at having the courage to fail, several researchers at the University of Gothenburg think.
12
GUJOURNAL SUMMER 2022
In the book Kris i forskningsfrågan: eller vad fan får vi för pengarna? (Crisis in research: or what the hell are we getting for our money?) that was published a couple of years ago, the journalist and social commentator Hanne Kjöller examines how well taxpayers' research money is managed by politicians, authorities, universities and the researchers themselves. Her conclusion is, of course, that it is not managed very well. In the current climate, as the trial of Paolo Macchiarini is coming to an end, the book is relevant once again. It was the infamous surgeon's use of humans as guinea pigs that made Kjöller wonder how our research system
works. How was it even possible that he was granted research funding? In the book, Kjöller focuses on a number of themes that are well-known within the research community but largely unknown to the public, and the one that received the most media attention was about the so-called “reproduction crisis”. That's completely understandable. Kjöller quotes John Ioannidis at Stanford University who in one of the world's most quoted articles (2005) showed that half of the research results published in the most prestigious journals are incorrect, as they cannot be replicated when the experiments are repeated. Furthermore,
