Companion Article - Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html
Science: Branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged. So says the dictionary. But, as most scientists appreciate, the fruits of what is called science are occasionally anything but. Most of the time, when attention focuses on divergence from this gold (and linguistic) standard of science, it is fraud and fabrication — the facts and truth — that are in the spotlight. These remain important problems, but this week Nature highlights another, more endemic, failure — the increasing number of cases in which, although the facts and truth have been established, scientists fail to make sure that they are systematically arranged. Put simply, there are too many careless mistakes creeping into scientific papers — in our pages and elsewhere.
A Comment article on page 531 exposes one possible impact of such carelessness. Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis analyse the low number of cancer-research studies that have been converted into clinical success, and conclude that a major factor is the overall poor quality of published preclinical data. A warning sign, they say, should be the “shocking” number of research papers in the field for which the main findings could not be reproduced. To be clear, this is not fraud — and there can be legitimate technical reasons why basic research findings do not stand up in clinical work. But the overall impression the article leaves is of insufficient thoroughness in the way that too many researchers present their data.
The finding resonates with a growing sense of unease among specialist editors on this journal, and not just in the field of oncology. Across the life sciences, handling corrections that have arisen from avoidable errors in manuscripts has become an uncomfortable part of the publishing process.
Lots of the “evidence” is just speculation. It starts with speculation that cells form from green slime and they further speculate cells developing into more advanced life into Human beings.
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
THE TRUTH WEARS OFF
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
SNIP
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
This is unalloyed good news!
This site estimates there are about 50 million scientific articles ever published, but gives no real estimate for the total per year.
It must be many tens of thousands, depending on your definitions of terms.
So, of all those millions of articles, virtually none were reviewed carefully enough to find their mistakes in the year 2000.
Today a couple of hundred get retracted each year.
Scientifically speaking, that's a .0004% error rate, overall -- not too bad, a step in the right direction.
But I doubt if scientists as a group are really anywhere near that good, most likely there should be a lot more rejections, but at least these days more serious efforts are made to find them.
That's good news.