Last week in Lab Notes we were told that we shouldn’t believe what we read in sci­en­tific jour­nals and to take headline-grabbing arti­cles with a grain of salt. Not because they’re intrin­si­cally false, but because if they aren’t, it’s only a mat­ter of time before they’re repli­cated and corroborated.

Les­son: if a find­ing is impor­tant, it will be repli­cated. Until it is, don’t believe it. How long might you have to wait? “The delay between the report­ing of an ini­tial pos­i­tive study and sub­se­quent pub­li­ca­tion of con­cur­rently per­formed but neg­a­tive results is mea­sured in years.”

More wis­dom from the comments:“Why are we sur­prised? When sci­ence bumps up against prof­its, guess which one reigns?” Sad but true.

via Seed

Update: Also via Seed, The Econ­o­mist picks up on the research and uses the eco­nomic the­ory of the winner’s curse as an analogy.