[projektfu]

In the couple years I spent doing biology research, about 8 years ago, I was skeptical of most research from China because it already had a reputation already of being untrustworthy. But why stop at China?

I spent a good part of a year trying and failing to replicate an English study, and looking around for materials referenced in another study that simply don't exist, finally being told by the principal on that study that they mischaracterized the materials in the paper. Sometimes when you get the results you are hoping for, you publish, and you don't care if they were wrong, right?

Perhaps it would be better if scientists generally took a more skeptical view of others' publications and tried to replicate them in house. At conferences, instead of asking, "Where do we go from here", with the first study, ask, "What do I need to do to replicate this?"

[nonbel]

I had a very similar experience. And you are correct that these problems are not at all limited to "China", although those authors tend to be a little less sophisticated in their (what may generously be called) shortcuts.

For example, if you do a real literature review on a medical topic (not just credulously take their word for it) you are almost sure to find that one of the primary assumptions/claims was actually never studied. One paper refs a second which refs a third that speculated about it in the introduction, but now "everyone knows it".

[projektfu]

So true. This is especially important as people study ways of improving metrics of markers of disease instead of actually improving disease endpoints. For example, there is a supplement marketed in the veterinary space that may lower blood urea nitrogen in uremic animals, according to a study. Whoop-de-do! I don't care about urea, it doesn't cause the disease of uremia. It is just a marker. You could convert all the urea to ammonia and now have a patient with two diseases and a BUN of 0.