[saintx]

According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.

To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."

> He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.

1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.

2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions.

3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.

Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...

[ThePhysicist]

The thing about science is that it's quite unpredictable. While I'm sure we can increase the efficiency of the system I'm not sure where the efficiency ceiling lies, as even with great processes it's simply not possible to know beforehand which approaches will be successful (if you did it would not require research).

I mean, look at the proportion of software projects that fail, which I'd estimate to be 50 % at least. And software engineering operates with much fewer unknowns compared to research.

Physics research is similar: Much of the research does not yield world-changing technology, or anything useful at all. I wouldn't say it's useless though, as unsuccessful projects still can provide inspiration for new research avenues and even if the research fails, the researcher (hopefully) gets better at doing research in the process, so the chances of producing something good the next time he/she tries increase.

I think the most promising avenue of increasing research productivity is to make it possible for more people to do quality research. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not, so let's create more opportunity.

[ink_13]

Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem, and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way".

Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.

[dajohnson89]

If the attempt is novel, wouldn't it be worthwhile to share your failed results to help prevent others going down the same dead-end path you just did?

[meow1032]

Here's a link to the actual source, rather than that garbage news article: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2016/07/01/much-biomedical-researc...

[dantheman]

It could be that there is too much money in science - there are too many under-qualified people jamming up the system. Requiring more administration and overhead to make them effective. Jamming the information channels with bad studies, reducing the signal to noise ratio.

[cma]

If things aren’t highly reproducable, similar studies aren’t needlessly redundant.