Monday, October 21, 2013

Reliability check …

Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab | The Economist.

Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.
Scientists are people. And being smart and highly trained does not make one immune to human failings.

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