Free Republic

"Trust the science," say the media. Polls show that fewer Americans do. There's good reason for that. "They don't trust science because science is increasingly untrustworthy," says science writer Andrew Follet in my new video. "The only group that trusts science right now is Democrats." Sixty-four percent of Democrats have "a great deal" of confidence in the scientific community, compared to 34% of Republicans. Of course, true science -- using the scientific method -- is important. But that's not what much of "science" is these days. Instead, today government science is misused by progressive politicians. Example 1: Environmental activists want...

Springer Publishing, one of the world’s leading publishers of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) books and journals, issued an announcement this week that 64 different professional articles, primarily in the medical field, had been retracted. It turns out that the vaunted peer review process, designed to ensure that multiple sets of experts evaluate the quality of the work before it hits the presses, had fallen apart. The peer reviews in some cases were found to be “highly suspicious” with bogus email addresses and questionable credentials. Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...