Why do journals accept these papers? If you can just make shit up, it kind of makes the whole value of a paid journal moot. What value do they add if not reviewing the damn paper?
For example Yoshihiro Sato was recently (2016-2017 time frame) caught fabricating results, turns out he had been doing it for 30 years. He had more than 20 papers retracted. Also note he wasn't caught by a fellow scientist in the field he was caught by a statistician bulk processing papers looking for anomalies. So yeah big penalties if you are caught, but the odds of getting caught are so low you have to be stunningly stupid to get caught.
You make a good point about colleagues in the same lab noticing unethical behavior. A shared research culture that values integrity and transparency is a good defense against malpractice and fraud. Building up and maintaining that culture—and the methodological skills to back it up—is a continual challenge.
Even medications made in high volume processes have rejected units (and sometimes, batches). Process drifted, machine failed, raw ingredients had some issue.
A scientific paper at the very early stage is meant to show that something is possible if the conditions are just right. It may be actually outside the capability of the lab to document (or measure, or even know) every variable that makes up these conditions. One of the reasons there is such a chasm between lab and practice is that as people dive in for deeper review and productization, they find the process is too finicky, the applicability too narrow, etc. But the scientific paper is the first step in this process of discovery.
That said, it's critical that authors document whatever they do know or have control over. Electronic publishing, tools like Github, etc, all make the barrier for disclosure much lower.
Confirmation is inherently impossible, but we should be able to weed out bad papers with higher accuracy.
a) if the null hypothesis is true, 5 times
b) if the null hypothesis is not true, anywhere between 0 and 100 times (depending on what is the true alternative)
This is quite different from your previous assertion that the expected number of successful replications would be 95 out of 100.
> Even medications made in high volume processes have rejected units (and sometimes, batches). Process drifted, machine failed, raw ingredients had some issue.
Sure, but here the process is known in details, so the manufacturer can just rerun it. A scientific paper (with supplemental material) should be exactly such a detailed process description, so that researchers could run it if they want.
Now, if the paper does not contain enough information to enable its reproduction, then there's really no way to tell whether it described real results, tampered results, or whether it was just made from whole cloth.
There's no shame in being wrong. But there is shame in making sure no one can check if you're wrong.