Research Methods and Techniques 2014 Flashcards
Why do we need a scientific method?
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
Read the following quotation:
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at
the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of
acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural
Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange
had extracted from a lichen. In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any
reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to
understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings
immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are
meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not
exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have
submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More
than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. The
paper took this form: Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of
cancer cell Z. To substitute for those variables, I created a database of molecules,
lichens, and cancer cell lines and wrote a computer program to generate hundreds
of unique papers. Other than those differences, the scientific content of each
paper is identical. There are numerous red flags in the papers, with the most
obvious in the first data plot. The graph’s caption claims that it shows a ”dose-
dependent” effect on cell growth the paper’s linchpin result but the data clearly
show the opposite. The molecule is tested across a staggering five orders of
magnitude of concentrations, all the way down to picomolar levels. And yet, the
effect on the cells is modest and identical at every concentration. One glance at
the paper’s Materials & Methods section reveals the obvious explanation for this
outlandish result. The molecule was dissolved in a buffer containing an unusually
large amount of ethanol. The control group of cells should have been treated with
the same buffer, but they were not. Thus, the molecule’s observed ”effect” on cell
growth is nothing more than the well known cytotoxic effect of alcohol. (Cited
from Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? John Bohannon,Science 4 October 2013 )
What can you conclude about the peer review process, and in particular the peer review process for open access journals from this study.
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
Suppose you have two studies one of which claims that by using a 3Ghz AMD
processor instead of a Raspberry Pi the average run time of a set of programmes
drawn from published benchmarks in different fields was reduced from 9.1
seconds on the Raspberry PI to 1.9 seconds on the AMD processor, and another
that claims that programmes run with the Jikes java compiler run on average 10
% faster than those compiled with Javasoft Javac.
Which of these studies should have used the larger sample of programme tests
and why
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
Suppose you are asked to test whether head up displays for car navigation
systems or conventional dashboard mounted system are safer because of causing
less driver distraction. Design an experimental protocol to evaluate this question.
You should analyse the strengths and limits of the your protocol and justify
design choices that you have made and consider ethical issues.
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
Why should we in general prefer simple and elegant theories to ones with a
highly complex structure and a great many free variables. Give the shorthand
phrase used to describe this preference.
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
Explain with one or more example, the difference between spurious and real
correlations.
Research Methods and Techniques 2014
