Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of those look like the result of fishing around for positive results, e.g. “We can’t find a significant result… unless we split people into a bunch of genotype buckets, in which case one of them gives a small enough p-value for this journal.” I haven’t read the studies in question so maybe I’m being unfair here, but still, it feels fishy.
You may be right. It’s not quite M&M colors, though; there was apparently some reason to believe this allele would have an effect on the relationship between red meat and cancer. If anything, you might claim that the fishing around is occurring at the meta level: the buckets are “genetics has an effect”, “the cancer’s location has an effect”, “how the meat is cooked has an effect”, and so on.
I believe at least part of the reason for this is that “the correlation between red meat and cancer is 0.56” or whatever is not an interesting paper anymore, so we add other variables like smoking to see what happens. (Much like “red meat causes cancer” is a more interesting paper than “1% of people have cancer”.) I’m not sure whether this is good or bad.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of those look like the result of fishing around for positive results, e.g. “We can’t find a significant result… unless we split people into a bunch of genotype buckets, in which case one of them gives a small enough p-value for this journal.” I haven’t read the studies in question so maybe I’m being unfair here, but still, it feels fishy.
You may be right. It’s not quite M&M colors, though; there was apparently some reason to believe this allele would have an effect on the relationship between red meat and cancer. If anything, you might claim that the fishing around is occurring at the meta level: the buckets are “genetics has an effect”, “the cancer’s location has an effect”, “how the meat is cooked has an effect”, and so on.
I believe at least part of the reason for this is that “the correlation between red meat and cancer is 0.56” or whatever is not an interesting paper anymore, so we add other variables like smoking to see what happens. (Much like “red meat causes cancer” is a more interesting paper than “1% of people have cancer”.) I’m not sure whether this is good or bad.