This paper focuses on discussing four myths and concerned conventional practices of film cooling research guided by a series of computational simulations. The issues that have been discussed include: (a) the film cooling effectiveness (phi) is given a constant (0.6) to calculate the heat flux ratio (HFR = q ''/q(o)'') between film-cooled and no-film cases; (b) the adiabatic wall temperature is the driving temperature of film cooling; (c) the adiabatic film heat transfer coefficient can be obtained from an isoenergetic film experiment (T-j = T-g); (d) using a heated surface can provide a simplified approach to simulate the film-cooling condition. The result shows that the adiabatic wall temperature is not always the driving temperature (i.e. T-aw is not always larger than T-w), but T-aw does act well as the reference temperature in correctly predicting the heat flux direction and giving an always positive adiabatic film heat transfer coefficient. Using a constant value for phi is questionable and may lead to un-realistic or false HFR. The conventional equation of HFR was not theoretically exact and can lead to an error of up to 20%. A revised HFR equation is provided in this paper. The dominant energy passage in turbine airfoil film cooling is always from hot combustion gas flows into the airfoil; therefore, employing a heated wall as a boundary condition with hotter main stream flow and cold film injection to simulate the actual film cooling condition is found to be fundamentally questionable. A conjugate simulation that includes wall heat transfer and internal flow cooling shows that reversed heat transfer from blade to gas that gives a negative HFR is possible, due to the heat conduction from the downstream hotter region into the near film hole cooler region. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.