At this point, it is hardly a surprise to learn that even top scientific journals publish a lot of low-quality work — not just solid experiments that happen, by bad luck, to have yielded conclusions that don’t stand up to replication, but poorly designed studies that had no real chance of succeeding before they were ever conducted. …
The replication crisis in science is often presented as an issue of scientific procedure or integrity. But all the careful procedure and all the honesty in the world won’t help if your signal (the pattern you’re looking for) is small, and the variation (all the confounders, the other things that might explain this pattern) is high.
From this perspective, the crisis in science is more fundamental, and it involves moving beyond the existing model of routine discovery. CONT.
Andrew Gelman (Columbia), New York Times