You can't always believe what you read in elite peer-reviewed journals. Even the top journals in medicine frequently publish erroneous or falsified information. And the problem is getting worse over time. The number of articles retracted in major journals has been increasing in recent years. To some extent this is because journal editors, at last awakened to the scope of the problems, have been combing through past publications to root out false and erroneous articles, but the fact that so much misinformation has been published and has gone unchallenged for so long should serve as a reminder that science is a human enterprise and as such subject to all the foibles of humanity.
To clarify: the title is excerpted from Act 1 of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. The full quote goes: "Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes." It's a warning against spending too much of your life in scholarly pursuits.
Day By Day
Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority
You can't always believe what you read in elite peer-reviewed journals. Even the top journals in medicine frequently publish erroneous or falsified information. And the problem is getting worse over time. The number of articles retracted in major journals has been increasing in recent years. To some extent this is because journal editors, at last awakened to the scope of the problems, have been combing through past publications to root out false and erroneous articles, but the fact that so much misinformation has been published and has gone unchallenged for so long should serve as a reminder that science is a human enterprise and as such subject to all the foibles of humanity.
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