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To: CHRISTIAN DIARIST
"To wit, The New York Times published a chart this week showing that such retractions have increased from a mere three instances in 2000 to a whopping 180 in 2009."

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.

8 posted on 04/20/2012 3:43:15 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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To: CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Oh, here we go:
"Results.
We estimate that in 2006 the total number of articles published was approximately 1,350,000.

"Of this number 4.6% became immediately openly available and an additional 3.5% after an embargo period of, typically, one year.
Furthermore, usable copies of 11.3% could be found in subject-specific or institutional repositories or on the home pages of the authors."

So, if 1.3 million articles published in 2006, then it must be nearly 2 million today, meaning retractions of 180 articles gives science an error rate of .001% = 99.9% accuracy.

I still think it's far too few retractions.
The true error rate is likely ten times that, but nobody's really checking them close enough.

9 posted on 04/20/2012 4:06:27 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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