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A New Record For Scientific Retractions?
sciencehabit writes "An investigating committee in Japan has concluded that a Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a whopping 172 papers over the past 19 years. Among other problems, the panel, set up by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, could find no records of patients and no evidence medication was ever administered. 'It is as if someone sat at a desk and wrote a novel about a research idea,' the committee wrote in a 29 June summary report."
And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.
Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.
Peer review is not designed to catch fraud, although it can, as to work on the assumption that the work may be fraudulent would cost too much and would not even be effective against cleverer frauds. The only way to catch a clever fraud is to try and replicate their work, and this can only happen after publication, usually when another researcher tries to build on the original work. If you do this all fraud will eventually be caught, the best you can hope for in the long run, as a scientist committing fraud, is to be thought of as critically incompetent. For this reason fraud is rare among academic scientists, but is unfortunately more common among their commercial counterparts.