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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.
Lots of old reports, research, etc are known to have been grossly biased, outright doctored, or using questionable results towards questionable confirmations or refutations of the hypothesis.
As a simple example, go read up on the Coca plant, and UN level attempts to eradicate wild plants from its ENTIRE HABITAT RANGE and the ecological damage that has been done as a result.
Hint: While refined cocaine in recreational quantities is dangerous and addictive, individual leaves contain 5 percent of coca extracts per leaf mass, and have non-recreational uses especially in their natural range, as well as modern commercial success as teas and other herbal supplements. Furthermore use as a topical anesthetic requires 1/100th of the dosage used by people to get high. The danger is that unlike marijuana, and more like opiates, cocaine can saturate receptors to the point of causing cardiac arrest or other serious medical issues if misused.
My point being: Any science currently considered controversial will have politically motivated research aimed to either prove or refute the stance that is most politically favorable to the people in power, whether those people are religious, governmental, or commercial in nature. Always has been, likely always will be.
Despite your feelings to the contrary, the answer is no.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I may be dead wrong on this, but it seems like many of the studies and papers put out today are funded by grants from organizations which often have a (even if subtle) political or ideological agenda. And if the studies they fund support their position, they hand out more grants. If the studies go against it, that university sees its grants from that organization reduced. Perhaps this has an effect on the results of the studies? I'd like to hope not but it seems like anything we think is right is upside down anymore. I haven't looked into this very closely to see if my anecdotal data point is valid, but I'd like to see if anyone can validate it.
This article appears to contradict itself. It claims that the rate of inaccurate papers as a fraction of the total is not increasing. However, it also notes that countries with weaker misconduct policies, like China and India, have far higher rates of problem papers. It also notes that while the fraction of papers in these countries with issues is approximately constant the overall share of papers coming from these countries is increasing. Hence, the overall fraction of papers with problems must be increasing too because more and more papers are coming from countries with higher rates of inaccuracies while each country's individual accuracy rate (as a fraction) is constant.
It also seems very narrowly focussed on deliberate attempts to mislead since it concentrates on discipline procedures and investigations. However, the reproducibility problem is generally acknowledged to be mainly due to poor scientific practice, e.g. claiming that correlation implies causation or not understanding statistics, and not due to deliberate malfeasance.
The data also show that there does appear to be a slight increase in the number of corrections per journal - although this is only small and the plot fails to provide error bars so it is impossible to know whether or not this is statistically meaningful. It also cryptically mentions that this is for journals which issue corrections suggesting that there are journals which do not issue them.
The number of invitations I get to be an editor on new journals by predatory publishers has markedly increased over the past few years so, at least based on my experience, that there appear to be many more predatory journals than there used to be and I would be amazed if any cared enough to publish errata given that there is no money in it for them so, if the fraction of junk publications has increased this might entirely hide a large source of irreproducible papers from this study.