EDITORIAL

WHERE IS SCIENCE?

Brazilian dental research has produced high quality and high impact studies, but there has been an alarming rate of growth in dissemination of concepts and theories with no basis in trustworthy methodology, primarily on social media.

A model is being adopted that is based on subjectivity and is unsupported by reproducible scientific methods, very often based on the idea that if it is difficult to disprove a hypothesis that has been formulated, then it must be true. Casual observations are transformed into dogma and are reproducing virally.

It has been forgotten that science is knowledge that combines truth and the application of the laws of science, both acquired and tested by application of the scientific method, and that researchers must exclude their personal convictions from their scientific papers.

This situation calls for the application of methodological rigor to testing the experimental hypotheses that are formulated and evaluation of scientific evidence by means of systematic reviews with meta-analyses that assess the quality of the whole body of literature produced on a given subject, combining the results of several different studies to obtain a single conclusion.

It is becoming more and more essential to fight against this pseudoscience in which mere speculations, very often masquerading as science, attempt to acquire legitimacy and credibility.

Giulio Gavini
Full Prof. Endodontics
Head of Department of Restorative Dentistry
Dental School of University of São Paulo