Cailin O'Connor (University of California, Irvine), James Owen Weatherall (University of California, Irvine)
In this talk, we ask: how can funding agencies and scientific communities make use of credit incentives to protect the public from industry? Low powered studies are more likely to spuriously support erroneous conclusions. To industry interests every individual study that happens to show that, say, smoking is safe becomes a powerful tool in shaping public belief. Science needs to shape internal credit granting systems to remove incentives to publish many, low-powered 'least-publishable units'. This reasoning also means that funding bodies should allocate money to a few very high-powered studies, rather than splitting it up into many small grants.
