With your science background, you’ll find this interesting:
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/science-publishing-some-skepticism-required-180954871/
Thoughts?
Academic publishing can easily become groupthink, as citations build upon citations.
“With your science background, you’ll find this interesting:
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/science-publishing-some-skepticism-required-180954871/ Thoughts?”.
Much of science is conducted on the “honor system”, assuming that scientists can be trusted to honestly report their results. Peer review is mainly to detect errors in methods or conclusions and to insure that the work is novel and worthy of publication. However that only works as long as people have morals. Decades ago one of my Professors received a paper for review that was submitted by an author in India that was essentially a copy of one of this early papers (only the names were changed). Years ago I received a paper for review that had large sections copied (without credit or permission) from one of my publications. More recently I have seen a trend (mostly from foreign students) working in US universities, where results are not reproducible or made up entirely. The students work here for 4 or 5 years, and either they get tired of it of the work is going nowhere so they make up results, publish them, graduate with a Ph.D., and go back to where they came from.
Years later the work is found to be useless. This was fairly common as people in my group were checking out what looked like promising technology published in peer review journals or thesis’. These days getting a job in a University depends on the number of publications so the honest students are at a disadvantage. No honest people, no honest science.