Raising the bar

John Ioannidis has become one of the most-cited living scientists by telling his colleagues that a lot of what they think they know is wrong. His 2005 paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” has provoked vigorous debates in academic journals across scientific disciplines and on barstools around the globe.

Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, sparked another round of debate recently by publishing a proposal to lower p-value thresholds for statistical significance to 0.005 from the 0.05 level in common use today. The shift would move about 30% of research results from statistically significant to merely suggestive, he estimates...