John Ioannidis of the "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" fame is starting a new institute at Stanford University to monitor and study science that's not quite up to par, the Economist reports.
Ioannidis and Steven Goodman, the other founder of the institute, which has been dubbed the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford or METRICS, also plan to study whether attempts to reproduce studies have affected the credibility of science.
Additionally, METRICS will examine the 'wasted effort' that goes on in science, the Economist says, as a number of funded studies are poorly designed, duplicate others' efforts, or are never reported.
"METRICS will support efforts to tackle this extraordinary inefficiency, and will itself update research about the extent to which randomized-controlled trials acknowledge the existence of previous investigations of the same subject," the Economist says. "If the situation has not improved, METRICS and its collaborators will try to design new publishing practices that discourage bad behavior among scientists."
The institute also plans to launch a 'journal watch' to keep an eye on poor publishing practices and sloppy researchers, the Economist says.