At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!
There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over the Earth - often for decades if not centuries).
Most is relatively well verified, and often tells you how it was verified [2]. Often it's obtainable in publicly available datasets that numerous other researchers can verify was obtained from a legitimate source. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
There's lots of data available. Much is also verifiable in a very personal way simply by walking somewhere and looking. In many ways, social sciences should be one of the most rigorous disciplines in most of academia.
[1] Using Wikipedia's grouping on "social sciences" (anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
[2] Census 2020, Data Quality: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...
[3] Economic Indicators by Country: https://tradingeconomics.com/indicators
[4] Our World in Data (with Demographics, Health, Poverty, Education, Innovation, Community Wellbeing, Democracy): https://ourworldindata.org/
[5] Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/en
[6] iNaturalist (at least from a biological history perspective): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43577-Pan-troglodytes
[7] Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Data Sources: https://www.archsynth.org/resources/data-sources/
[8] Language Goldmine (linguistics datasets): http://languagegoldmine.com/
[9] Pew Research (regular surveys on economics, political science, religion, communication, psychology - usually 10,000 respondents United States, 1000 respondents international): https://www.pewresearch.org/
[10] Marinetraffic (worldwide cargo shipping): https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...
[11] Flightradar Aviation Data (people movement): https://www.flightradar24.com/data
[12] Windy Worldwide Web Cameras: https://www.windy.com/?42.892,-104.326,5,p:cams
The complaint is that their data often doesn't strongly support the hypothesis, and dubious statistical techniques are performed to make it appear otherwise. And just poor statistics abilities (not malicious intent).
Physicists get away with it because they often just don't do any statistics. Often the data aligns so well with the hypothesis that you don't need any sophisticated techniques, or their work doesn't involve any data (like my example in my prior comment).
Most US trained physicists have never taken a course in statistics. It's not in the curriculum in most universities. When I was in school and would point it out, the response was always "Why do we need a whole course in statistics? We learn it in quantum mechanics."
No. That's probability you learn. Not statistics.
In social sciences (and medicine) people take a lot more statistics courses because the systems are much more complex than typical physics systems. A lot more confounding variables, etc. They simply need more statistics.
(Yes, yes. I know. There's probably some experimental branch in physics where people actually do use statistics. But most don't).
I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.