A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform

[MindMover]

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers.

It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”

The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,” said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

[HereSince1628]

1. Deceitfulness is a bane of science.

It is also more or less characteristically human.

You may remember in the mid 1990's a prank paper produced by a physicist for publication in a humanities journal.

The prank was supposed to expose the weakness of journal review in humanities.

Over the past 20 years, as membership in the community of scientists grew, so did the number of people who are motivated to falsify.

There is very little to protect science from a knowledgeable determined liar, other than retraction.

I pity anyone who worked the discredited publications into their own work.

[eridani]

2. But it always gets shot down eventually

Other people design experiments based on faux data and can't reproduce them, so the original deception gets outed.

[eqfan592]

3. As a wise man once said...

...science is a self-correcting process. It's just too bad that people still try to deceive...