What's the difference between dubious and unreliable?

Dubious


Definition:

  • (a.) Doubtful or not settled in opinion; being in doubt; wavering or fluctuating; undetermined.
  • (a.) Occasioning doubt; not clear, or obvious; equivocal; questionable; doubtful; as, a dubious answer.
  • (a.) Of uncertain event or issue; as, in dubious battle.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s impossible to automate fully the process of separating truth from falsehood, and it’s dubious to cede such control to for-profit media giants.
  • (2) The draw was enough to take England to the finals in Japan, where Beckham exorcised the demons of four years earlier by scoring the only goal (a dubiously awarded penalty) in the defeat of Argentina.
  • (3) But Blair's address - "history will forgive us" - was a dubious exercise in group therapy: the cheers smacked of pathetic gratitude, as he piously pardoned the legislators, as well as himself, for the catastrophe of Iraq.
  • (4) I drive past buildings that I know, or assume, to house bedsits, their stucco peeling like eczema, their window frames rattling like old bones, and I cannot help myself from picturing the scene within: a dubious pot on an equally dubious single ring, the female in charge of it half-heartedly stirring its contents at the same time as she files her nails, reads an old Vogue, or chats to some distant parent on the telephone.
  • (5) A dubious pattern is emerging of donations through front companies.
  • (6) The relationship of this metabolic aberration to the production of headache still remains dubious for various reasons.
  • (7) During his stints in the Bush and Obama administration Comey has continually taken authoritarian and factually dubious public stances both at odds with responsible public policy and sometimes the law.
  • (8) Today the overestimation of human understanding is reflected in a dogmatic adherence to specific professional or idealogically biased doctrines and in the dubious ideal of a purely empirical science with its limited applicability to mankind.
  • (9) It seems clear that even as we buy cheap clothes with dubious provenance, from an ethical standpoint, people want to do better.
  • (10) Their mechanism is dubious: swelling of mitochondria and intracellular lipidosis, which could signify cellular hypoxia, are rarely present.
  • (11) Imprecise definitions of these complications of necrotizing pancreatitis make inter-institutional comparisons of previously identified data dubious.
  • (12) Critics say this is part of a broader, dubious attempt to appease the Kremlin and boost bilateral trade.
  • (13) In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Mr Grieve has clutched at a fragile constitutional doctrine and adopted a deeply dubious legal course.
  • (14) Exporting what appear to be educational success stories is a dubious enterprise, because it is so easy to misread how another country's system works and to discount its cultural background.
  • (15) Observed retrospectively, in some cases death was the result of dubious indication.
  • (16) The Guardian’s own readers’ anthology of dubious deals – crusty rolls 40p, two for £1!
  • (17) Sensitivity (dubious + positive, after exclusion of inadequates) was 0.83 and dependent on histologic type (infiltrating = 0.87, intraductal = 0.68).
  • (18) The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers.
  • (19) This becomes very dubious when they are more numerous.
  • (20) The change in surface tension did not correlate with a change in lung retractive forces or with lung lipid content and was, therefore, of dubious biological significance.

Unreliable


Definition:

  • (a.) Not reliable; untrustworthy. See Reliable.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Pure bile gave 32 correct diagnoses (67%) and 14 diagnoses of inadequate material (29%), which contained few nondegenerated cells and made microscopic diagnosis unreliable.
  • (2) This measurement system, therefore, was found to be unreliable.
  • (3) My unreliable BlackBerry was hurting business," she said.
  • (4) It is well known that dopaminergic agents are stimulators of GH release in man, and although responses are sometimes unreliable, oral L-dopa and iv dopamine have frequently been employed in the evaluation of GH-deficient states.
  • (5) The existence of a latent viral infection state in these seronegative subjects indicates the unreliability of standard serological analysis in people who have been in regular contact with infected patients.
  • (6) The unreliable items were then deleted, and the revised scales were assessed in Study 2.
  • (7) Although electroencephalogram was set up to detect the sign of brain ischemia during surgery, it became unreliable because of electrical noise from the medical instruments.
  • (8) In high thoracic level lesion paraplegics monitoring heart rate was considered to be unreliable because of suspicion of injury to the sympathetic contribution to the cardiac plexus.
  • (9) The eversion technique was unreliable and probably injurious to endothelial cells.
  • (10) Our results implied that crepitation is a rather unreliable sign of arthrosis.
  • (11) In other words clinical and laboratory diagnosis of "cardiac liver" was found to be totally unreliable whereas, among instrumental examinations, liver echography proved to be a reasonably efficient alternative to laparoscopy.
  • (12) During automated perimetry with the Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer, field examinations are labeled unreliable whenever the reported rate of fixation loss is 20% or more.
  • (13) It is only useful when there is doubt and in this case both a lateral and an antero-posterior film are necessary as the obstetric conjugate alone was unreliable in predicting the transverse diameter of the inlet as well as the outcome.
  • (14) The size of the spleen was an unreliable diagnostic parameter as regards involvement with lymphogranulomatosis.
  • (15) Although exercise-induced ST segment depression is thought to be unreliable marker of myocardial ischemia in the presence of resting electrocardiographic changes, this conclusion is based on limited and disparate data from studies often lacking acceptable measures of ischemia.
  • (16) Preliminary evidence (n = 15) with semiquantitative (latex) determinations of C-reactive protein (CRP) suggested an unreliable CRP response in systemic Group B streptococcal infection.
  • (17) Solubility tests for sickling disorders (Itano) also proved unreliable.
  • (18) We emphasize that maternal serum AFP levels may be unreliable for prenatal screening for fetal neural tube defects in women taking valproate and recommend that amniocentesis and fetal ultrasound examination should be offered directly.
  • (19) Australia has chosen an unreliable security and surveillance partner.
  • (20) Whereas suboptimal sensitivity and sampling error may make a negative diagnosis unreliable, lymphoma marker studies (combined with morphology) allow for an accurate and confident diagnosis and subclassification of lymphoma in the majority of cases.