Bruce, Classic, good news.
Firstly, the number of fraudulent articles per decade is in the hundreds. There are over 100,000 academic journals, each publishing either yearly, quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. Each issue will have a dozen or more articles. We're talking something between one and five million articles per year. Maybe a few dozen are fraudulent. Compare that to other industries - how many badly made cars or building are done each year? How many unsafely cooked meals are served in restaurants? etc etc. as a percentage, it is minute. What percentage of news media reports are bull#$%#?
And for Classic, every article
is suspect. That's the point of publication. Anyone else working in that field will read the article and try to pick it apart. If it seems interesting, they will replicate the experiments. If no-one can reproduce the results, people start scrutinising the original article very closely.
You're right, though, to not get carried away when we read in the paper that "scientists have discovered that ...". Always wait for checking and so on.
I notice that this is the second thread we've had in a few months about criticisms of academic and scientific research.
It didn't start in the cellar, but I'm wondering if some vested interests are deliberately trying to undermine confidence in research.