Skip Navigation

This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (4)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Savitz, D. A
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Savitz, D. A
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

International Journal of Epidemiology 2001;30:957-958
© International Epidemiological Association 2001

Point-Counterpoint

Commentary: Prior specification of hypotheses: cause or just a correlate of informative studies?

David A Savitz

Department of Epidemiology, Campus Box #7400, University of North Carolina School of Public Health, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–7400, USA. E-mail: david_savitz@unc.edu

Published epidemiological studies are prone to spurious positive findings. This is not just an issue bearing on the discipline's credibility to outsiders but a fundamental methodological concern. Epidemiologists must accept the challenge to improve research methods, publish findings regardless of their implications, and objectively appraise the validity of our results and those of our colleagues. Results are often dichotomized as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, despite the loss of quantitative information resulting from this practice. The aetiology of false positive reports is surely multifactorial. Some of this falls to the media and the public for overinterpretation. Some results from the exuberance of investigators who advertise their most surprising, dramatic findings, despite the fact that results that run counter to the conventional wisdom are most likely to be erroneous. Human beings (not just . . . [Full Text of this Article]

References


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Am J EpidemiolHome page
J. Young, P. Graham, and T. Blakely
Modeling the Relation between Socioeconomic Status and Mortality in a Mixture of Majority and Minority Ethnic Groups
Am. J. Epidemiol., August 1, 2006; 164(3): 282 - 291.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]