Question: What would you do to improve science

Sam Smith answered on 10 Mar 2016:

This is definitely one of the best questions i’ve had so far. And it’s one I’ve asked myself – we only have 25-30 years to make a difference in science, so what shall we do to make a difference?

One of the big controversies in science and medicine at the moment, is that some experiments are reported, but the results cannot be repeated by other scientists – people get different results. But the problem is, only the new and exciting results get reported, and the boring failures are ignored. So if new medicines get tested and shown to be effective, but then no one else finds the same thing, the medicine can still get approved. This issue is called ‘replicability’ and it is a big issue in psychology and medicine.

I would make sure that all experiments are registered beforehand, so that everyone has to report their findings regardless of what they find. This is already being done for some types of studies (see the http://www.alltrials.net campaign), but I would love to make sure that all studies did it. This would stop a lot of bias in the science, and make sure we got more accurate answers to the questions we ask.

Thanks for asking this brilliant question.