The Big Event

       Everything began in April of 2013, specifically the tenth of April; the study that seven authors: Katherine S. Button a research psychologist at the University of Bristol and also a journalist, John P. A. Ioannidis a professor of at least four different departments at Stanford University, Claire Mokrysz a PhD student at University College London, Brian A. Nosek an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Jonathan Flint is the Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow and Honourary Consultant Psychiatrist and Michael Davys Professor of Neuroscience in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, Emma S. J. Robinson the Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, and Marcus R. Munafòl another professor at the University of Bristol, had created was finally posted online.

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       The study focused on how neuroscience had perhaps undermined its own reliability with its small sample sizes making the statistical power of the studies weak and ineffectual. This publishing online of the article was the big event of the controversy because it immediately generated news throughout the scientific communities; after long months of research bent over computers, with large mugs of caffeinated beverage at all hours the seven authors of this article, scouring forty-nine different published studies and checking through the statistics and ability to be repeated of all the experiments and research, came to the conclusion that most neuroscience studies have only on average the statistical power of 20%. The dropping of such a bomb immediately generated response, and while the response was of the scientific article type and so it wasn’t posted until many months after, this paper sparked great controversy.