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About the Authors:
John P. A. Ioannidis
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliations Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America, Department of Medicine, Department of Health Research and Policy, and Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, United States of America, Department of Statistics, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, California, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3118-6859Abstract
Meta-research is the study of research itself: its methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives. Given that science is the key driver of human progress, improving the efficiency of scientific investigation and yielding more credible and more useful research results can translate to major benefits. The research enterprise grows very fast. Both new opportunities for knowledge and innovation and new threats to validity and scientific integrity emerge. Old biases abound, and new ones continuously appear as novel disciplines emerge with different standards and challenges. Meta-research uses an interdisciplinary approach to study, promote, and defend robust science. Major disruptions are likely to happen in the way we pursue scientific investigation, and it is important to ensure that these disruptions are evidence based.
Citation: Ioannidis JPA (2018) Meta-research: Why research on research matters. PLoS Biol 16(3): e2005468. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005468
Published: March 13, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Ioannidis John P. A.. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) has been funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The work of John Ioannidis is funded by an unrestricted gift from Sue and Bob O’Donnell. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Abbreviations: NIH, National Institutes of Health; R&D, Research and Development; STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
Provenance: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed
Science, like all human endeavors, is prone to biases. Yet science can assess its own methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives [1]. A relatively new discipline, called meta-research, covers a wide range of theoretical,...