Job-Oriеntеd Courses That Will Boost Your Career in 2024
How Do We Know What We Know?
1. How Do We Know
What We Know?
UTPA
Bioethics: Creating and Challenging Knowledge in Health
Edinburg, Texas, April 2013
Ivan Oransky, MD
Executive Editor, Reuters Health
Co-Founder, Retraction Watch
@ivanoransky
5. “Winner Takes All” Incentives
“The winner-take-all aspect of the priority rule
has its drawbacks, however. It can encourage
secrecy, sloppy practices, dishonesty and an
excessive emphasis on surrogate measures of
scientific quality, such as publication in high-
impact journals.”
-- Fang and Casadevall, Scientific American
23. Does The Literature Reflect Reality?
Publish a trial that will bring US$100,000
of profit or meet the end-of-year budget
by firing an editor.
-- Former BMJ editor Richard Smith
25. Positive Publication Bias
“The overall frequency of positive supports
has grown by over 22% between 1990 and
2007, with significant differences between
disciplines and countries.”
“…the strongest increase in positive results
was observed in disciplines—like Clinical
Medicine, Pharmacology & Toxicology,
Molecular Biology”
Fanelli, Scientometrics 2012.
29. FDA: “Black-or-White Approval”
“…abandon the current black-or-white approval
process in favor of an incremental, conditional one.
In such a process, drugs could be provisionally
approved after promising early-stage data, with the
FDA retaining the option to revoke that approval
later on, should unexpected data come to light.”
“A ‘conditional approval’ approach would grant
limited marketing authorization to new drugs after
successful Phase II trials.”
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/
30. Confirmation Biases
“Facts do not accumulate on the blank slates of
researchers' minds and data simply do not speak for
themselves. Good science inevitably embodies a
tension between the empiricism of concrete data
and the rationalism of deeply held convictions.”
“…awareness of the systematic errors that can occur
in evaluative processes may facilitate the self
regulating forces of science and help produce
reliable knowledge sooner rather than later.”
-- Kaptchuk, BMJ, 2003;326:1453–5