Suspicious pattern of too-strong replications of medical research

Howard Wainer writes in the Statistics Forum:

The Chinese scientific literature is rarely read or cited outside of China. But the authors of this work are usually knowledgeable of the non-Chinese literature — at least the A-list journals. And so they too try to replicate the alpha finding. But do they? One would think that they would find the same diminished effect size, but they don’t! Instead they replicate the original result, even larger. Here’s one of the graphs:

How did this happen?

Full story here.

1 thought on “Suspicious pattern of too-strong replications of medical research

  1. Ingram Olkin outlined what could be good research practices in China that could also explain this (SAMSI 2008).

    Might be something on line – things like funding real high powered studies given now fairly well suspected effect sizes.

    Have no idea if it’s a better explanation.

    K?

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