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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare, but about finding errors in reasoning by the authors, lack of needed experimental controls, faulty statistical analysis and so on. The retracted papers aren't necessarily fraudulent in a malicious way, but by circumventing the peer review process as the authors did, it is hard to judge the merits of the papers -- they might be great papers or they might be crap.

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>The point of peer review isn't primarily about finding fraud, which is rare.

Rare? Scientific misconduct is rampant. It seems like theres a new professor every day being caught out on retraction watch.

That's like thinking crime is rampant given that every time you look at a tabloid newspaper there's a story about some robbery or murder. You have to do the math and realize that even if every story is true they still are very rare occurrences given the number of people in the community (physical or scientific)

Good point, but scientific papers can have larger ramifications in social policy,funding allocation(billions of tax dollars), even daily public life (food guidelines).

It's also far more important for science to keep its hands clean because fair or not its public relations is important. In our high technological society, we cannot allow people to lose faith in the scientific process, It would be a global disaster.

Bypassing the review process and saying you did it is fraud.

Yes, but a fraudulent act of publishing, not that the experiments themselves were necessarily fraudulent. I was responding to someone who was thinking there had to be something the authors were covering up rather than the more likely case that they were just lazy and unethical.

So why risk a criminal record and/or the end of an otherwise prosperous career as a scientist if you have no motive?

If I was this lazy and unethical, I'd probably not do the experiments/study in the first place and just pocket the funding.

That would be far harder and riskier. You don't just get a blank cheque for money in academic science that you could pocket. You have a pool of virtual money that you can request purchases and pay people's salaries from. Both go through university accountants who check things for anything fishy.

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