Stories by Hilda Bastian

Knowledge accumulates. But studies can get contradictory or misleading along the way. You can’t just do a head count: 3 studies saying yes minus 1 saying no thumbs up.

In a courtroom, the full power of the state comes down on an individual. No one should have to face that on their own. A criminal defense lawyer was making this argument to me after a long day in the court we were both working in.

It began, as life changes often do, when I bought a book. It was in Sydney and I wrote the year in it: 1982. You know when it feels as though something could have been written just for you?

Was this the year open access for science reached critical mass? One hypothesis suggests that a transformative group needs to reach one-third to be prominent and persisting.

It’s not often that a research article barrels down the straight toward its one millionth view.Thousands of biomedical papers are publishedevery day.

Imagine if there were a simple single statistical measure everybody could use with any set of data and it would reliably separate true from false.

The scientific literature is full of it. By which I mean, of course, spin, error and less-than-reliable results. All that noise makes it tough to keep up with what’s important to read and buzz about.

Pieces of information, disputed and not, can be woven very quickly into competing explanatory narratives. Press the right buttons, then it can be lightning fast to order them into a line leading to this or that logical conclusion.

Disasters are heart-wrenching. The scale of the distress and suffering can be hard to bear even when you’re just watching snug and safe in your unaffected lounge room.

There are just so many young people here. I’m at the 21st birthday meeting of an organization I got to help build, the Cochrane Collaboration.

Some old wives’ and doctors’ tales are pretty harmless. Behind the myths about blackheads and acne, though, it gets very ugly. And what the truth shows us about how superficial we can be isn’t pretty either.

Are researchers’ dogs eating a lot of their homework? Well, yesterday afternoon at the quadrennial medical editors’ scientific meeting in Chicago, we found out they kinda are.

Yesterday’s uplifting emphasis at the quadrennial medical editors’ scientific meeting was bad research (“Bad research rising”). This morning’s motivational agenda focused on measuring some of the main techniques for jazzing up research results.

Yesterday’s uplifting emphasis at the quadrennial medical editors’ scientific meeting was bad research (“Bad research rising”). This morning’s motivational agenda focused on measuring some of the main techniques for jazzing up research results.

What do the editors of medical journals talk about when they get together? So far today, it’s been a fascinating but rather grim mixture of research that can’t be replicated, dodgy authorship, plagiarism and duplicate papers, and the general rottenness of citations as a measure of scientific impact.

Work can wind us up. Vacations are supposed to wind us down. But just how much benefit do we get from our vacations? How quickly does any benefit wear off?

It started, as many issues do, because we didn’t get enough roughage in our diets. Before dietary fiber gained currency in the ‘70s as a way to protect against serious disease, people who believed we were eating ourselves into early graves weren’t taken very seriously.

It’s easy to see a “cause and effect” relationship where there isn’t one. Or overlook one that should be as plain as daylight. Sometimes, these errors are dramatic.