Source of the science news is very important.

Also, some studies are not complete and some news considered it as facts and you need to be careful regarding that.

Dear David,

Your question is relevant. There is no clear answer to that. You have to check the facts every time. American researchers have reproduced a hundred studies to verify them. As a result, less than half of the counter-studies came to the same conclusion as the original research. There are many people who say that false sciences govern the world. Scientific fraud is more widespread than is believed. Fraud means manipulation or even invention of the results. Examples of recent years include those that are probably the two most famous. First, the study, led by Britain's Andrew Wakefield, showed a link between MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) and autism with an intestinal problem from a dozen cases. The investigation not only showed that this link was fabricated from scratch by Wakefield, unknown to the co-authors, but that the doctor had also subjected the children he was studying for painful examinations without any reason. The second example, also highly publicized, is that of the South Korean Hwang Woo-suk who had become a world star after announcing in 2004 in Science, the cloning of a human embryo in order to produce stem cells. An imagined result, backed up by false photographs, which led the researcher to a spectacular disgrace.

At the beginning of the millennium, a study published in Epidemiologic Reviews accused dairy products of promoting prostate cancer. A few years later, the American Journal of Epidemiology testified to the contrary, after following a cohort of more than 80,000 men for a decade. This example, reported by Pierre Barthélémy on his blog "Passeur de sciences", reveals the great confusion of scientific research, and illustrates as much the confusion as the public can feel in the avalanche of studies carried out (and signals contrary sent). But the public can count on John Ioannidis. This professor of Stanford University has become the hero of the denunciation of the drifts of scientific studies. In 2005, he demonstrated that some of them were based on questionable statistical bases, rendering the value of the results invalid. In the same essay, "Why most research findings are wrong," he pointed to the bias of many clinical trials that precede drug marketing. In 2012, John Ioannidis, aided by Jonathan Schoenfeld, reviewed a total of 300 studies linking cancer with randomly selected foods in a cookbook first published in 1896, Boston Cooking School Cook Book. They were particularly interested in the methodology of the researchers, paying great attention to the interpretation of the results. However, in 80% of the cases, the link between food and cancer was exaggerated, drawn by the hair, or even downright imaginary. Worse, seven times out of ten, the researchers did not hesitate to ignore the results that did not agree with the working hypothesis in the summary of the study (which everyone consulted first). Removing what is "not significant" is also a widespread practice aimed at maximizing the chances of publication of research in the pages of scientific journals. They prefer to talk about positive results - in other words, discoveries - rather than negative results, which have equally scientific value. John Ioannidis did not stop there. On his blog, Pierre Barthelemy reports the new pavement in the pond launched by the American professor, whose title of the last article says everything: "How to make sure that more published studies are true". As a preamble to his text, John Ioannidis claims that between 1996 and 2011, he recorded no fewer than 25 million scientific studies from some 15 million people around the world. It thus suggests that the number of real discoveries is by no means comparable to this insane figure.

Part of the problem lies in the lack of willingness of the scientific world to reform, regain efficiency and regain public credibility.

John Ioannidis describes, in selected terms but often contain their dose of vitriol, an academic world sometimes sclerotic where people who attribute public research budgets are rarely great researchers, where conservatism disputes him to nepotism and Sexism. The paragraph devoted to the conflict of interest is worth its weight of peanuts: "Sometimes the same person wears several hats: a university researcher can also run a magazine, own a start-up, be a member of a society Scholar, government advisor and / or receive money from the industry. John Ioannidis's shiver is not just a jerk. As Pierre Barthélémy writes, it does not seek to "demolish science or those who do it with great blows of tire-changer", but rather "to improve the functioning of research because the room for maneuver, he is tall ". Thus, in order to restore some order in the scientific world, he proposes to give value only to studies that have been successfully reproduced or which have led to treatments, for example. And for good reason ! In a portrait of him published in Stanford University magazine in 2012, John Ioannidis said that "99% of [scientific] literature was unreliable".

The word "pseudo" means false. The surest way of identifying and recognizing the false is to know as much as possible about the truth, and in this case, about science itself. Knowledge of science does not simply mean knowing scientific facts (such as the distance from Earth to the Sun, the age of the Earth, the difference between a mammal and a reptile, etc.). This means understanding the very nature of Science, evidentiary criteria, the design of meaningful experiments, the establishment of different possibilities, the verification of hypotheses, the elaboration of theories, the many aspects of scientific methods that allow plausible and reliable conclusions to be drawn of the physical universe.

With my best regards

Prof. Bachir ACHOUR

Firstly, I pay obeisance to the revered Quality Guru W. Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality management.   who said  'In God we trust; all others bring data

Well, science is always based upon facts proven by science.

The news which is based/ signifies verifiable / scientifically poised info could be believed.

being sacrosanct  is the pathway to the process that tests the credentials & vice versa

With best regards

Prof P Thareja,  http://thareja.com