Posted on 05/21/2015 10:43:27 AM PDT by wagglebee
This "study" was retracted. Even top-notch journals like Science can make mistakes on occasion; their quality is validated by their actions once they discover the mistake. They did the right thing by issuing the retraction. Had they not issued a retraction, then their position as one of the world's leading journals would have to be questioned.
Had the piece been peer reviewed it most likely would not have appeared at all.
It was peer-reviewed, but whoever the reviewers were, they didn't catch on to the article's obvious flaws. This does, unfortunately, happen sometimes.
The most egregious example of a paper that was peer-reviewed and published despite the fact that it was utter rubbish (the shockingly low quality of the "research" should have been obvious to anyone who has any understanding of the research process at all) was the one by Andrew Wakefield, claiming a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. It wasn't just bad research, it breathed new life into the age-old anti-vax movement, and it still has influence many years after it was retracted.
The peer-review process is not perfect, by a long shot. However, it does stand as a barrier to a lot of real garbage getting published.
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