YOU’D be a fool to believe everything in the papers. Made-up facts, half-baked analysis, hand-picked conclusions – yes, scientific papers can seem no more reliable than the tabloid press.
In the past month alone, concern over fraud in medical research papers has prompted the retraction of one paper in The New England Journal of Medicine and disciplinary action against the lead author of another, published in the British Medical Journal. In both cases the whistle-blowers were co-authors of the papers who became concerned about the reliability of the research and asked that the papers be retracted.
Some will see this as…
