A scientific citation is available for any claim you want to make in the world. Any. Which is why one of my consistent pet peeves is this thing: "here is a study to back this claim" or "send me a study to prove your claim."

This is epistemic laziness disguised as rigour. Because it ignores how science actually works.

Three reasons.

First, most casual consumers of science don't have the ability to properly distinguish between a great study, an okay study, and a terrible study. Which is the whole game.

Is the person linking or asking for a study really doing the rigorous job of assessing whether it's a randomised controlled trial with 10,000 participants or a small observational study with 200 people funded by the industry it's meant to evaluate? Most people don't have a mental model for this. So just "yeah there is a study for this" means nothing.

Second, even if a study is absolutely bang-on perfect, it doesn't mean much in isolation. Because science doesn't work by individual findings. It works through accumulated evidence, slowly, across many studies and methods. A single study showing X almost never settles anything. It's an input.

Take statins and cholesterol. For decades, individual studies have pointed in different directions: on how much they help, for whom, and at what cost. No single study settled the question. What matters is what the full body of evidence says, where experts converge and diverge, and how confident we should be given what we don't yet know.

Third, even when a study is real and well-conducted, there is a difference between statistical significance and practical significance. A result can be statistically significant—meaning the effect is real—and still be practically meaningless. A study might show that not eating after 10pm has a link with weight loss. But how large is that effect really, and how much does it matter compared to just staying in overall calorie deficit? That's what matters.

This is why having a study for a claim doesn't mean much in itself.

The truth is engaging with scientific literature is hard. It requires rigour and scientific literacy. And most of us—myself included—need to find experts we trust who can help us assess what the literature is actually saying. That is the job of good science communication. And it's precisely what we lack most.