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What if I told you that half of the studies published in scientific journals today – the ones upon which news coverage of medical advances is often based – won’t hold up under scrutiny? You might say I had gone mad. No one would ever tolerate that kind of waste in a field as important – and expensive, to the tune of roughly US$30 billion in federal spending per year – as biomedical research, right? After all, this is the crucial work that hunts for explanations for diseases so they can better be treated or even cured.

Wrong. The rate of what is referred to as “irreproducible research” – more on what that means in a moment – exceeds 50%, according to a recent paper. Some estimates are even higher. In one analysis, just 11% of preclinical cancer research studies could be confirmed. That means that an awful lot of “promising” results aren’t very promising at all, and that a lot of researchers who could be solving critical problems based on previously published work end up just spinning their wheels.