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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Our study also helps provide a framework for future mechanistic studies on

I realize that repeat studies are important generally in science. But, many studies (particularly health related) seem to have such a result built into their design. If you get a result, it will just be preliminary and require a larger sample study moving on.

Is there a mechanism in science for actually taking these preliminary results and validating/falsifying them more conclusively? Does a result like this make a larger scale study this team's top priority for the next study? Will these results convince another team to do the full study?

Otherwise, it feels like there's something structurally wrong. If the study is designed as a non-conclusive prototype or framework, what's the point unless it leads to other studies?

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I wish there was a sort of Snopes/Politifact/Rotten Tomatoes for science - an independent body that queried the top scientists in each field, and used this to quantitatively map the current state of the art and the consensus (or lack thereof) around that field's theories. Instead of e.g. 'the current state of CRISPR research' or 'P vs NP' being something that lived implicitly in the minds of the few researchers that keep up to date with all the relevant papers, it could be explicit on the site for all to see (including journalists, who would finally have an easy way to avoid putting their foot in their mouth with another 'Scientists show that lung cancer causes smoking!' headline). Even if all that could be said in a given area was 'Correlation has been shown, causation has not, a study is underway to try to establish this, and 60% of randomly queried researchers in the area believe causation will be proven' then that would still be super valuable. The result "99% of climate researchers and meteorologists believe climate change to be manmade" is a great result, but it would be much more hard-hitting if it came from an institution that was already considered to be reliable.

This mechanism already exists in some way with top journals and peer-reviewing. Their credibility relies on their capability to select the most important and proven papers.

A preliminary finding can be important, if there's a follow up. If not...

In medicine it's called the Cochrane Library

Yes, that's probably the closest thing there is. I wish we had this for all fields of science

You can find that information in review papers. Once information has solidified enough one of the main researchers will write an account of the current state of the field.

I'm really grateful that those review papers are being made, but they're not a very accessible source for non-experts. How do I find them? How do I know if a given review paper is exhaustive or not? If it's still relevant or has been superseded by another one? What I'm suggesting is to generalize the work being done to create review papers into a resource that is easy to find, authoritative and continuously updated.

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