[netizen-936824]

For me personally, I'm involved in academia and research so I live and breathe it. It's difficult for me to evaluate papers outside of my domain, and takes a huge amount of background research to do so.

A good first filter is usually (not always) seeing the journal its published in. The primary thing here though, is not looking for good journals but rather avoiding the known predatory ones.

My concern is for the people who don't live and breathe research. There is a massive amount of depth and detail that is easily overlooked when you're unfamiliar with the subject.

Things like poor method can invalidate results, and people unfamiliar with the particular methodology can miss that. Even the statistical analysis could be flawed, or they use a statistical method which is not appropriate for their data or study design.

[tux3]

The studies published by people who are really into ESP and paranormal ideas are annoying like this.

It's an exercise in making papers that look like they have vaguely decent protocol and statistical methodology, but arrive at insane, obviously wrong results through cleverly non-obvious, intricate flaws.

Like the Underhanded Code Contests, but for research.

[zozbot234]

> It's an exercise in making papers that look like they have vaguely decent protocol and statistical methodology, but arrive at insane, obviously wrong results through cleverly non-obvious, intricate flaws.

What if I told you that 90% of all research findings are like that.

[tux3]

I'd ask you to show me the pre-registered cross sectional study you did to come up with that number =)