TY - JOUR T1 - Is most published research really false? JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/050575 SP - 050575 AU - Jeffrey T. Leek AU - Leah R. Jager Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/27/050575.abstract N2 - There has been an increasing concern that most published medical findings are false. But what does it mean to be false? Here we describe the range of definitions of false discoveries in the scientific literature. We summarize the philosophical, statistical, and experimental evidence for each type of false discovery. We discuss common underpinning problems with the scientific and data analytic practices and point to tools and behaviors that can be implemented to reduce the problems with published scientific results. ER -