The event that will take place physically. Registration is free but necessary.
The talk will take place at amphitheatre ARAGO (central building of Ecole Polytechnique) - Health Pass is mandadory
Abstract
Meta-research, or research on research, is becoming more popular, with applications and repercussions across diverse scientific disciplines. The goal is to study research practices and identify their weak points and ways to optimize them and to make the research ecosystem more efficient. Brute force empirical approaches are becoming more attractive, given the advent of massive production of scientific data and scientific papers (~200 million published to-date) as well as the massive availability of systematic reviews and meta-analyses (>100,000 published to-date) where data on similar (or potentially similar) research questions are juxtaposed and synthesized. It is therefore increasingly easy to perform analyses that may investigate the big picture of evidence and whether specific patterns of results from diverse studies are consistent with patterns of bias or true heterogeneity. The lecture will discuss a variety of such meta-epidemiological applications. These studies can offer insights towards improving the reproducibility of scientific investigation. Moreover, there is increasing interest to make science more transparent and open and this includes not only data sharing and code sharing but also pre-registration practices and other approaches that can facilitate having more trust in the protocols and products of research. Different disciplines show different rates of improvement on these practices, and special circumstances, e.g. the recent COVID-19 pandemic, have created both challenges and opportunities for more reproducibility and better quality of research. The lecture will navigate the landscape of research practice improvements across diverse disciplines in the current landscape.
J. Ioannidis - short CV
John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc is Professor of Medicine, Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, and Professor (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science at the School of Medicine, Professor (by courtesy) of Statistics at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-Director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) and he is also visiting Einstein fellow and Director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center Berlin (METRIC B) at the Berlin Institute of Health. He is the recipient of many awards. He has been inducted in the Association of American Physicians, the European Academy of Cancer Sciences, the American Epidemiological Society, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the Academy of Sciences of Bologna. He has received honorary titles from FORTH and U Ioannina, honorary doctorates from the Universities of Rotterdam, Athens, Tilburg and Edinburgh and multiple honorary lectureships. The PLoS Medicine paper on “Why most published research findings are false” has been the most-accessed article in the history of Public Library of Science (3 million hits). He is among the 10 scientists with the highest current citation rate in the world (~6,500 new citations per month per Google Scholar).
