¡°Bad science¡± spreads through universities in a process similar to Darwinian natural selection, a paper has argued.

It coins the phrase ¡°the natural selection of bad science¡±, whereby laboratories that use potentially shaky methods that lead to lots of publication produce successful graduate students who spread these methods when they themselves open new labs.

¡°Laboratory methods can propagate either directly, through the production of graduate students who go on to start their own labs, or indirectly, through prestige-biased adoption by researchers in other labs,¡± the paper argues.

¡°Methods which are associated with greater success in academic careers will, other things being equal, tend to spread.¡±

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A ¡°replication crisis¡± in science, in which researchers are not able to reproduce others¡¯ results, has been blamed on a number of types of ¡°bad science¡±, including a reluctance to double-check findings and statistical manipulations to get a publishable result. ?

This latest paper focuses on the problem of statistically underpowered studies: using too few subjects in an experiment for the results to be reliable.

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It found that statistical power in the social and behavioural sciences has not improved since the first warnings of underpowered experiments in the early 1960s.

¡°Statistical power is quite low¡±, found "", published in Royal Society Open Science, and ¡°more importantly, statistical power shows no sign of increase over six decades¡±.

¡°The data are far from a complete picture of any given field or of the social and behavioural sciences more generally, but they help explain why false discoveries appear to be common,¡± it says.

Last year, an attempt to reproduce 100 prominent psychology papers found that only about a third managed to replicate statistically significant results.

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david.matthews@tesglobal.com