As a relative newcomer to biomedical research, I’ve spent the better part of the last year and a half reading biomedical research journal articles. I was quickly shocked by the number of articles with unclear, incorrect, or otherwise poorly done statistical analyses.
This article was one of the first search results from a Google search using the terms “poor quality biomedical research”. It provides a good overview of many of the issues, including misuse of statistics.
This blog post by Richard Smith, which is an update from this article by D.G. Altman, offers another take on the issue. The following passage aligns with what is arguably true in higher education/research in general:
Why, asked Altman, is so much research poor? Because “researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry out research that they are ill equipped to perform, and nobody stops them.” In other words, too much medical research was conducted by amateurs who were required to do some research in order to progress in their medical careers.
From: Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal
This quote highlights a major cause of the problem:
Altman’s conclusion was: “We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons. Abandoning using the number of publications as a measure of ability would be a start.”
From: Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal
As a statistician supporting biomedical researchers, I see my role in improving biomedical research as offering researchers simple statistical tools that avoid common statistical errors while also working towards incorporating larger changes (e.g., modern Bayesian methods) for revamping statistics in biomedical research. Interested readers can Google “moving beyond p<0.05” to see the many efforts on this front.