The Center for Scientific Integrity – the non-profit organization that runs Retraction Watch – has launched a project aimed at rounding up flawed and fake medical-research papers and neutralizing their impact on health guidelines. The Medical Evidence Project will be run by James Heathers, a science-integrity consultant and self-described "data thug" based in Boston, Massachusetts.
The project, which has a US$900,000 grant from funder Open Philanthropy in San Francisco, California, to run for two years with a team of three to five people, aims specifically to root out flawed papers that have a serious impact on medical guidelines by skewing meta-analyses – reviews that combine the results of multiple similar studies to come to a statistically more powerful conclusion.
