Any topic. Ideally some number from the study was widely shared to push a point.
1,000One of my favorite examples of how a lot of science is nonsense. You'll see the "fact" that having a cat in his pictures makes a man's dating profile worse, and it always traces back to this. The trick is there are only two pictures with cats in them and they're both unnatural and awful https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341239/
Apparently the Stanford prison experiment was a huge mess. Bad methodology, no controls, small and badly selected sample population and the author specifically wanted to prove his point.
Collection of sources here:
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4102
https://richmond.app.box.com/s/xzsm3fg017f8do2nfc7jwf3q2jozhjmt
An outlandish 2014 National Academy study takes the cake. It basically says that giving hurricanes more “feminine” names causes several times more fatalities because people don’t take them as serious threats. None of the four authors have any formal competency in public safety or meteorology. The entire paper is based on backwards logic, doesn’t control for variables, and tries to justify a false conclusion. One of the most dumbfounding errors is that a large portion of their hurricane data comes from before 1979, when hurricanes were only given female names. Other than that, the supposed association is only supported by a couple massive outliers like Hurricane Katrina and Sandy.
A couple other absurd (though less qualified) studies include this paper in American Anthropologist tying sexual promiscuity and linguistic evolution using the most ridiculous scatter plot of all time, as well as this actually accepted study from the so-called International Journal of Advanced Computing Technology.
This is a good time to remind people of this so they can update their base rates:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
JPA Ioannidis
The Surgisphere scandal had completely fake data on Covid published in top medical journals... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgisphere