{"id":672,"date":"2011-07-30T15:52:13","date_gmt":"2011-07-30T20:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/?p=672"},"modified":"2011-08-04T14:11:01","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T19:11:01","slug":"journal-club-the-value-of-hypothesis-driven-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/journal-club-the-value-of-hypothesis-driven-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Journal club – “The value of hypothesis-driven research”"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days many cherish “hypothesis-driven” research and trash everything that is observational, exploratory and non-translational. And yet the hypothesis in many research is “post-research” hypothesis. The “hypothesis” itself is also often generated for the sake of having an hypothesis; the essence of the research can still be exploratory.<\/p>\n

So when funding is getting scarce and the pressure of coming up with beautiful hypothesis is mounting, one must ask what the value of hypothesis-driven research is. Is it the only way to get important findings? Is it delivering more than other “inferior” approaches?<\/p>\n

As I am thinking about these questions and situation all the time, I am leading a journal club in the lab on 8\/1 and trying to discuss the philosophical aspects of this with my lab members. And I want to write this down and have a record before we do so. We will read a few articles:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pisani E. Has the internet changed science?<\/a> Prospect 2010; 177:54 [pdf<\/a>]<\/li>\n
  2. Kell DB, Oliver SG. Here is the evidence, now what is the hypothesis? The complementary roles of inductive and hypothesis-driven science in the post-genomic era. Bioessays. 2004 Jan;26(1):99-105. PubMed PMID: 14696046.<\/li>\n
  3. Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med. 2005 Aug;2(8):e124. Epub 2005 Aug 30. PubMed PMID: 16060722; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC1182327.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    and discuss a few questions, in addition to the ones I have above:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Are data mining or descriptive research useless?<\/li>\n
    2. What are the downsides of doing “hypothesis-driven research”?<\/li>\n
    3. Are we\/funding agencies\/authorities doing the society a favor by insisting scientists to have a hypothesis\/justification attached to a research idea? how about research that has translational value (i.e. curing disease)? or technical value (e.g. developing a cheaper and faster way to sequence human genome?)<\/li>\n
    4. Is\/Can there a balance between different scientific research approaches?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      These days many cherish “hypothesis-driven” research and trash everything that is observational, exploratory and non-translational. And yet the hypothesis in many research is “post-research” hypothesis. The “hypothesis” itself is also often generated for the sake of having an hypothesis; the essence of the research can still be exploratory. So when funding is getting scarce and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faisharing","category-journal-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leung.bio.purdue.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}