‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’ — Marcia Angell
0.04% of papers are retracted. At least 1.9% of papers have duplicate images “suggestive of deliberate manipulation”. About 2.5% of scientists admit to fraud, and they estimate that 10% of other scientists have committed fraud.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” — Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet
The statcheck program showed that “half of all published psychology papers…contained at least one p-value that was inconsistent with its test”.
The GRIM program showed that of the papers it could verify, around half contained averages that weren’t possible given the sample sizes, and more than 20% contained multiple such inconsistencies.
The fact that half of all papers had incorrect data in them is concerning, especially because it seems to match Richard Horton’s intuitive guess at how much science is simply untrue. And the GRIM paper revealed a deeper problem: more than half of the scientists refused to provide the raw data for further checking, even though they had agreed to share it as a condition for being published.
After some bloggers exposed an industrial research-faking operation that had generated at least 600 papers about experiments that never happened, a Chinese doctor reached out to beg for mercy: “Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible … Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family … You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same.“
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422
‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’ — Marcia Angell
0.04% of papers are retracted. At least 1.9% of papers have duplicate images “suggestive of deliberate manipulation”. About 2.5% of scientists admit to fraud, and they estimate that 10% of other scientists have committed fraud.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” — Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet
The statcheck program showed that “half of all published psychology papers…contained at least one p-value that was inconsistent with its test”.
The GRIM program showed that of the papers it could verify, around half contained averages that weren’t possible given the sample sizes, and more than 20% contained multiple such inconsistencies.
The fact that half of all papers had incorrect data in them is concerning, especially because it seems to match Richard Horton’s intuitive guess at how much science is simply untrue. And the GRIM paper revealed a deeper problem: more than half of the scientists refused to provide the raw data for further checking, even though they had agreed to share it as a condition for being published.
After some bloggers exposed an industrial research-faking operation that had generated at least 600 papers about experiments that never happened, a Chinese doctor reached out to beg for mercy: “Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible … Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family … You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same.“