Scholars convene to address ‘crisis’ of ‘false’ scientific research

The National Association of Scholars is holding a conference aimed at “fixing science” and flawed practices that it says are resulting in blatantly false scientific conclusions coming out of America’s universities.

Organizers hope that the conference will facilitate conversations among academics, lawmakers, scientists, and others about “ways to fix how scientists work.”

“Many headline scientific findings in recent years have turned out to be false,” NAS explains.

“They can’t be reproduced—and if you can’t reproduce a result, it isn’t science. The headlines are just the tip of the iceberg. A huge amount of ordinary scientific findings published in peer-reviewed journals don’t replicate. Something has gone terribly wrong in contemporary scientific procedures,” the organization explains.

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The conference is set to focus on what NAS called the “irreproducibility crisis,” which the description says results in a wide range of different scientific outcomes also included in social sciences, epidemiology, and social psychology.

Event speaker Dr. David Traimow of New Mexico State University told Campus Reform that the conference will “address important problems in science, particularly the issue of irreproducibility.”

Traimow says that his presentation will propose a scientific procedure that he feels will contribute to solving the problem. “The idea is to state, prior to collecting data, specifications regarding precision and confidence,” Traimow said.

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The professor explained that the proposed method uses “equations” in order to determine “necessary sample sizes” to meet certain requirements for study samples. These equations, he says, are “ideal for addressing irreproducibility because it is possible to obtain the probability of meeting a precision specification given any particular sample size.”

Traimow explained that by applying this method “researchers can determine the reproducibility of their research even before they have performed it.”

Another featured speaker at the event, Dr. Barry Smith of the University of Buffalo, told Campus Reform that the “replication crisis” is “affecting not just behavioral and social sciences but also all other areas of biomedical research.” His presentation at the upcoming conference will use an example relating to medical imaging to demonstrate his own proposed strategy for addressing the issue.