Communications of the ACM
Are Research Papers Less Accurate and Truthful Than In the Past?
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An essential of science is that experiments should yield similar results if repeated. In recent years, however, some people have raised concerns that too many irreproducible results are being published. This phenomenon, it is suggested, may be a result of more studies having poor methodology, of more actual misconduct, or of both.
Or it may not exist at all, as Daniele Fanelli of the London School of Economics, suggests in "Is Science Really Facing a Reproducibility Crisis, and Do We Need It To?," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. First, although the number of erroneous papers retracted by journals has increased, so has the number of journals carrying retractions. Allowing for this, the number of retractions per journal has not gone up. Second, scientific-misconduct investigations by the Office of Research Integrity in America are no more frequent than 20 years ago, nor are they more likely to find wrongdoing.
From The Economist
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