On literature pollution and cottage-industry science
A few days ago there was a minor Twitterstorm over a particular paper that claimed to have found an imaging biomarker that was predictive of some aspect of outcome in adults with autism. The details actually don’t matter that much and I don’t intend to pick on that study in particular, or even link to it, as it’s no worse than many that get published. What it prompted, though, was more interesting – a debate on research practices in the field of cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, particularly relating to the size of studies required to address some research questions and the scale of research operation they might entail. What kicked off the debate was a question of how likely the result they found was to be “real”; i.e., to represent a robust finding that would replicate across future studies and generalise to other samples of autistic patients. I made a fairly uncompromising prediction that it would not replicate, which was based on the fact that the...