Bad Research

[Lamplighter]

Since my career did involve scientific publications, I am not a neutral observer here.

But a headline of "Bad Research" with no critical examination is bothersome for me.
What is especially so in this case is that the links provided do not allow direct access
to the original publication, so evaluation of source material is not possible.

I agree with Glatt. it is inappropriate to imply that US researchers
are more (intentionally?) fallible from these meager data,
particularly since the authors say the number of "repeat offenders" is signficant.

Here is an earlier report with a few raw numbers:

As the article below says, unintentional mistakes and errors do occur.
But in science the widely accepted ethical thing to do is publicly acknowledge such errors,
and do whatever is reasonable to correct the information.
Even financial reimbursement of the $-funding agencies is expected.
Such ethics are not always the case in other areas of public endeavor.

How many scientific papers should be retracted?
Murat Cokol, Ivan Iossifov, Raul Rodriguez-Esteban & Andrey Rzhetsky

Published scholarly articles commonly contain imperfections: punctuation errors, imprecise wording
and occasionally more substantial flaws in scientific methodology, such as mistakes in experimental design,
execution errors and even misconduct (Martinson et al, 2005).

These imperfections are similar to manufacturing defects in man-made machines:
most are not dangerous but a small minority have the potential to cause a disaster
(Wohn & Normile, 2006; Stewart & Feder, 1987).

Retracting a published scientific article is the academic counterpart of recalling a flawed industrial product
(Budd et al, 1998).

PubMed provides us with a ‘paleontological’ record of articles published in 4,348 journals with a known impact factor (IF).
Of the 9,398,715 articles published between 1950 and 2004, 596 were retracted.
This wave of retraction hits high-impact journals significantly harder than lower-impact journals (Fig 1A),
suggesting that high-impact journals are either more prone to publishing flawed manuscripts or
scrutinized much more rigorously than low-impact journals.

Our analysis indicates that although high-impact journals tend to have fewer undetected flawed articles
than their lower-impact peers, even the most vigilant journals potentially host papers that should be retracted.
However, the positive relationship between visibility of research and post-publication scrutiny suggests that the technical
and sociological progress in information dissemination—
the internet, omnipresent electronic publishing and the open access initiative—
inadvertently improves the self-correction of science by making scientific publications more visible and accessible.