Are Research Papers Less Accurate and Truthful Than in the Past? (economist.com)

An anonymous reader shares an Economist report: An essential of science is that experiments should yield similar results if repeated. In recent years, however, some people have raised concerns that too many irreproducible results are being published. This phenomenon, it is suggested, may be a result of more studies having poor methodology, of more actual misconduct, or of both. Or it may not exist at all, as Daniele Fanelli of the London School of Economics suggests in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. First, although the number of erroneous papers retracted by journals has increased, so has the number of journals carrying retractions. Allowing for this, the number of retractions per journal has not gone up. Second, scientific-misconduct investigations by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in America are no more frequent than 20 years ago, nor are they more likely to find wrongdoing.

Comments

This ain't news, nerds.

[Humbubba]

The term 'replication crisis' has been around since 2010, when more and more scientists found they could not reproduce the results of experiments of others [1].

In 2016, The Journal Nature published a story by Monya Baker, where more than 70% of 1,576 researchers tried and failed to reproduce other scientist's experiments [2].

Even worse, many did claim to have reproduced the Pons and Fleischmann Cold Fusion experiment shortly after their press release in 1989 [3]. So many in fact, Nathan Lewis of Cal Tech quipped "Cold fusion has been verified by no university without a good football team" [4].

The problem has been around for decades. I'm thinking there might be reasons, like patents, contracts, grants, money, and prestige. It could be that science, or at least a bunch of scientists, ain't what they're cracked up to be. Or maybe football appendages and their cozens just aren't that important.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

[2]https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_experiment

https://bwi.forums.rivals.com/threads/scientists-fleischmann-and-pons-cold-fusion-or-cold-illusion-25-years-later.10260/