John Ioannidis

John Ioannidis (2005), "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.[7]

Born in New York City in 1965, Ioannidis was raised in Athens, Greece.[8] He was valedictorian of his class at Athens College, graduating in 1984, and won a number of awards, including the National Award of the Greek Mathematical Society.[9] He graduated in the top rank of his class at the University of Athens Medical School, then attended Harvard University for his medical residency in internal medicine. He did a fellowship at Tufts University for infectious disease.[10]

From 1998 to 2010, Ioannidis was chairman of the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine. In 2002, he became an adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine.[11][9] He has also been president of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.[9] He is highly cited, having an h-index of 203 on Google Scholar in September 2020.[12]

He is now Professor of Medicine, Health Research and Policy, and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University School of Medicine and a professor, by courtesy, of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences.[13][14] He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and co-director, along with Steven N. Goodman, of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).[15][16]

He was the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation from 2010 to 2019.[17]

Ioannidis' 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"[7] is the most downloaded paper in the Public Library of Science.[18][19][20] In the paper, Ioannidis says that most published research does not meet good scientific standards of evidence. Ioannidis has also described the replication crisis in diverse scientific fields including genetics,[21] clinical trials,[22] neuroscience,[23] and nutrition.[24] His work has aimed to identify solutions to problems in research, and on how to perform research more optimally.[25][26]

Ioannidis' research at Stanford focuses on meta-analysis and meta-research – the study of studies.[27] Thomas Trikalinos and Ioannidis coined the term Proteus phenomenon to describe tendency for early studies on a subject to find larger effect than later ones.[28]

In an editorial on STAT published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis called the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic a "once-in-a-century evidence fiasco" and wrote that lockdowns were likely an overreaction to unreliable data.[14] Marc Lipsitch, Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, objected to this characterization of the global response in a reply that was published on STAT the next day.[29]

In March 2020, Ioannidis tried to organize a meeting at the White House where he and colleagues would caution President Donald Trump against "shutting down the country for [a] very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this," according to a proposal he submitted. The meeting did not come to pass, but on March 28, after Trump said he wanted the country reopened by Easter, Ioannidis wrote to his colleagues, "I think our ideas have inflitrated [sic] the White House regardless".[5]

Ioannidis widely promoted a study of which he had been co-author, "COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California", released as a preprint on April 17, 2020. It asserted that Santa Clara County's number of infections was more than 50 times higher than the official count, putting the virus’s fatality rate as low as 0.1% to 0.2%.[30] Ioannidis concluded from the study that the coronavirus is "not the apocalyptic problem we thought".[31] The message found favor with right-wing media outlets, but the paper dismayed epidemiologists who said its testing was inaccurate and its methods were sloppy.[32][33][34] Writing for Wired, David H. Freedman said that the Santa Clara study compromised Ioannidis' previously excellent reputation and meant that future generations of scientists may remember him as "the fringe scientist who pumped up a bad study that supported a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory in the middle of a massive health crisis."[6] On May 11, the study's authors revised the study with new figures[35] that still drastically underpredicted the severity of the virus.

It was later reported that authors of the study received funding from JetBlue's founder, which led to criticism over a potential conflict of interest.[36][37] In a guest opinion article in Scientific American, former colleagues of Ioannidis wrote that a legal firm had determined he had no financial conflict.[38]

In 2010, The Atlantic stated in a special edition about "Brave Thinkers" that Ioannidis "may be one of the most influential scientists alive."[39][40]

In 2014, The Economist featured Ioannidis and Steven Goodman in an article on the Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford.[41]

In 2015, Ioannidis was profiled in the BMJ and described as "the scourge of sloppy science".[42]

Ioannidis has received numerous awards and honorary titles and he is a member of the USA National Academy of Medicine,[43] of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and an Einstein Fellow.[13] In 2019, Ioannidis was awarded the NIH's Robert S. Gordon, Jr. Lecture in Epidemiology.[44]

• Open science
• Publication bias
• Replication crisis
• Reproducibility Project

• Prevention Research Center Stanford School of Medicine
• Publications of John Ioannidis Stanford University Profile
• Increasing value and reducing waste in research design, conduct, and analysis The Lancet, Vol. 383, Issue 9912, pp. 166–75, 11 January 2014 John P A Ioannidis, Sander Greenland, Mark A Hlatky, Muin J Khoury, Malcolm R Macleod, David Moher, Kenneth F Schulzand Robert Tibshirani
• Szgene.org, meta-analytic database of schizophrenia gene studies of which Ioannidis helped create.