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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps studies should be put into some kind of "scientific maturity level" ranking so lay people can better digest recent research?

SML1 - the first study on this topic, may be wrong, but could be pioneering

SML2 - the first confirmation study on an SML1 study, confirming the results

SML3 - one of multiple confirmation studies

SML4 - a consensus or meta-study that confirms the original SML1 study

SML5 - scientific consensus indicates the SML1 study is correct based on current scientific knowledge and is unlikely to be refuted in the near term.

Nobody outside of the immediate scientific circle should care at all until a topic is in SML3, and then it should be treated as bleeding edge and only show up in harder to digest science popularization magazines: Sci-Am for example. SML4 would be ready for the Pop-Sci "emerging science" column. And SML5 would be fit for newspapers and the general public.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochrane_Collaboration

I've never even heard of this before (which may be as much my fault as anybody's). I'm guessing most of the media hasn't either?

- cnn has 9 whole mentions, ever - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

-washington post has 50, https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

shouldn't this just be part of a normal journalistic vetting before publishing process?

Cochrane does systematic research; they take a class of researches, and "summarize" [very inappropriate term] them.

I don't think that this lends itself very well to the publishing process of research in general (meant as a stream of single researches).

Cochrane is one of the foundations of the book Bad science, which you would probably find interesting (assuming you're interested in the subject).

When it comes to the media, the situation is complex, because the interests of the media (and the institutions and so on) can be many, and research quality can be not the only one.

If on a scale from 0 to 10 of interest in quality, the Cochrane institution is a (just to say) 10, the Daily Mail would be a -5, since sensationalized garbage is much more productive for them than boring, low-key, truthful research.

[Of course, I don't mean that Daily mail is certainly not the reference or the standard.]

I've been getting the feeling american journalism has been slacking off, isn't trustworthy lately. ex. UVA (no)rape case, Brian Williams

Or just doesn't care, it could also be the revival of yellow journalism.

Your framework seems like a great idea, but I think it should also take into account if a study was done on animals or humans. Even reproducible studies in animals don't seem to translate well to humans in some cases:

http://www.dcn.ed.ac.uk/camarades

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