Wow. It does not appear that our scientists or our peer review process are nearly as trustworthy or reliable as we have been led to believe. There have been 170 retractions so far with many more expected. This is clearly a conspiracy within the scientific community to lie and to fake the validation of scientific results, for those simple minded folks who like to think that conspiracies are an impossibility.
Scientists! They can't help it..it's in their blood ..they say that they're working for us? ..But they really want is to rule the world!
Any more updates on this story since it came out (its from March)? Fraud of this manner is a serious issue. Peer review is essential to quality control in science. There is no better way to arrive at the truth of a scientific question, so this needs to be investigated thoroughly and appropriate measures need to be put in place.
This seems to be something I don't really care about. However this could change at any moment if coxotuberculosis in children or open tibial fracture fixaction become a huge part of my life.
Article said the majority of fake peer reviews are coming out of China. btw: I assume just because there was fake reviews, doesn't mean the papers have false results. Maybe some in China are so desperate to get recognized by a foreign journal that they falsely add more reviews to their submissions. Maybe they should require a review by known reviewers. But obviously if you get caught once, you should get blacklisted for a long time, and that should be enough to solve this.
That's it. Time to stop believing in evolution, the Big Bang theory, the Earth being 4 billion years old and climate change. Jesus here I come!
More where that came from http://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam Thankfully, there are things like impact factor and PageRank like algorithms that determine quality scientific results beyond mere acceptance to one journal. Quibbling over conspiracies in the back-end of scientific processing is all fine and good, but it misses the larger trend of science's work in all facets of your life: including the ability to post and connect on this forum Peer review does need to be overhauled to be more impartial and less likely to be self-suggested from what it looks like, but every system has its kinks. Insofar as these results have not stagnated progress, I don't see this being a big deal.
The scientific community is driven just as much by politics and money than any other industry. The way the grant and funding system works for most scientific research, you must continue to show traction down specific hypothesis for you to continue to get funding. As soon as you disprove your hypothesis, you are potentially out of funding (and a job). Not to mention the HUGE amount of money behind studies to prove or disprove things that have large political ramifications.
I think the good news is that some of these bad examples were caught. Hopefully they will be able to prevent future bad examples from happening.
Everything above and beyond a master's degree, and not having to teach 10 sections a year between Unis and JCs to be middle class, while everyone's complaining you only work "30 hours a week."
It's not so much what one could stop believing in as in getting crap past the radar like eugenics, piltdown man, intelligent design and anti-vaccination studies.
Why would science be unaffected by human nature? There is always some percentage of duplicitous self-serving lying pieces of crap humans in every endeavor. But at least with science you have peer review and review of peer review, it's a system that roots out most crap eventually. If you want to indict 'science' you would indict the science that assumes results and then tailors studies to support them and that is mostly by commercial concerns to deny real science.
True, science seems to indicate that living as hunter/gathers in sparser populations might be a more successful strategy to achieve the survival successes of dinosaurs. It's hard to imagine humans living 50 million years at this rate of consumption/pollution growth.
