Two years ago, a paper by Swedish neuroscientist Anders Eklund and colleagues caused a media storm. The paper, Cluster Failure, reported that the most widely used methods for the analysis of fMRI data are flawed and produce a high rate of false positives. As I said at the time, Cluster Failure wasn't actually making especially new claims because Eklund et al. had been publishing quite similar results years earlier - but it wasn't until Cluster Failure that they attracted widespread attention.
Perhaps Cluster Failure went mainstream is that it was the first of Eklund et al.'s false positive papers to be published in a high-impact journal (PNAS). But another reason is that it contained an alarming statement, namely that "These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies." This triggered many headlines implying that all of fMRI was suspect. Tom Nichols, one of the Cluster Failure authors, later clarified ...
