Just How Error-Prone And Self-Correcting Is Science?

Reproducibility: A Tragedy of Errors

Mistakes in peer-reviewed papers are easy to find but hard to fix, report David B. Allison and colleagues.

David B. Allison, Andrew W. Brown, Brandon J. George and Kathryn A. Kaiser | February 3, 2016

Just how error-prone and self-correcting is science? We have spent the past 18 months getting a sense of that.
We are a group of researchers working on obesity, nutrition and energetics. In the summer of 2014, one of us (D.B.A.) read a research paper in a well-regarded journal estimating how a change in fast-food consumption would affect children's weight, and he noted that the analysis applied a mathematical model that overestimated effects by more than tenfold. We and others submitted a letter to the editor explaining the problem. Months later, we were gratified to learn that the authors had elected to retract their paper. In the face of popular articles proclaiming that science is stumbling, this episode was an affirmation that science is self-correcting.

Staff members at the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Va., develop software that allows researchers to share their data, part of a movement to improve reproducibility in experiments. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-new-scientific-revolution-reproducibility-at-last/2015/01/27/ed5f2076-9546-11e4-927a-4fa2638cd1b0_story.html

<more at http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-a-tragedy-of-errors-1.19264; related links: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-published-easy-publishing-harder.html (Fixing published research mistakes not easy; fixing the publishing system may be harder. February 4, 2016) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-new-scientific-revolution-reproducibility-at-last/2015/01/27/ed5f2076-9546-11e4-927a-4fa2638cd1b0_story.html (The new scientific revolution: Reproducibility at last. January 27, 2015)>