Don’t (credible) journalists have an honour system of getting at least three sources for a story?
Can’t we make researchers get at least two more confirmations from separate teams for something far more important?
Don’t (credible) journalists have an honour system of getting at least three sources for a story?
Can’t we make researchers get at least two more confirmations from separate teams for something far more important?
If publication would require two more confirmations from separate teams, that would mean (a) doing the work in triplicate, so you get three times less results for the same effort; (b) the process would take twice as long as I spend a year doing the experiment and then someone else can start and spend a year doing the same experiment, and only then it gets published; (c) there's a funding issue - I have somehow got funding to spend many months of multiple people on this, but who's paying the other independent teams to do that?; (d) it's not a given that there are two other teams capable of doing the exact same research, e.g. if you want to publish a study on the results of an innovative surgery procedure, it's plausible that there aren't (yet!) any other surgeons worldwide who are ready to perform that operation, that will come some time after the publication; (e) many types of science really can't get a separate confirmation - for example, we have only one Large Hadron Collider, you can't re-do archeological digs, event-specific on-site sociological data gathering can't really be repeated, etc; so you have to take the data at face value.