Why “peer-reviewed” papers are being retracted at an alarming rate
I remember the date when it finally happened. After years of speculation and struggle, after a constant uphill battle for funding and reputability, CERN had done it. They’d confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson – the God Damn Particle.
I was ecstatic. I knew next to nothing about particle physics, but I knew what it meant for the field and I knew what it meant for the world. Then my friend told me to calm down, because no one had corroborated the findings. In a matter of moments, I went from feeling like I’d made the discovery myself to feeling like the discovery was utterly meaningless.
My friend had a reason to be critical, however. It was only a few months earlier that a team of scientists working on the OPERA Experiments – a collaboration between CERN and LNGS – had mistakenly announced the discovery of a faster-than-light neutrino. That event also set off a wave of celebration in the younger scientific community. As soon as the excitement had set in, however, OPERA announced their mistake. Their findings could not be corroborated, and the error was blamed on misfiring sensors, false calculations, and the worst error of all, human error.
Science has always faced a crisis of corroboration. When researchers strike gold and scream “eureka,” most people assume that their findings can begin to be applied to the real world. The truth is far removed from the musings of Archimedes. In today’s scientific climate, specifically to avoid pointless fanfare, findings are heavily criticized by a panel of experts before a single shred of research is publicized.
The typical acceptance process begins with researchers writing a detailed paper on their findings. Hypothesis, equipment, methods, observations, discussion, and conclusion are compiled into a single unpublished document, and sent to supervisors, advisors, and consultants for verification.
In many circumstances, papers are sent to journals – like Nature, Science, and PLOS ONE – so a certified panel of experts can verify a group’s findings. The panel’s purpose is not to become excited by the possibility of progress. Instead, the verifiers attempt to find as many holes as possible. To put it bluntly, the fewer papers accepted for publication, the better it is for the community; too many papers on miraculous cancer cures and the world tends to get skeptical.
Our world is currently in the midst of a peer-review fiasco. Major publishers are printing retractions on a harrowing scale, and publications are printing apologies for falsified research that has yet to pass peer-review.
On March 27, The Washington Post published an article explaining that BioMed Central, an open access journal, had retracted 43 scientific papers “because of ‘fabricated’ peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer-review racket affecting many more publications.” However, this retraction is only the proverbial tip of a larger problem. In July 2014, 60 articles were retracted by the Journal of Vibration and Control. According to The Washington Post and the science blog Retraction Watch, there have been “170 retractions in the past few years across several journals because of fake peer reviews.”
Science has always faced a crisis of corroboration, because our civilization gets excited very quickly and often avoids validating that excitement. The issue partially lies in the fact that most people don’t have time to read a 30-page document explicitly detailing a particular experiment. I’d also be lying if I said I understood everything I read, which is why news media has educated individuals to ensure that the public accurately understands life-altering, game-changing research.
We rely on others to help us learn what we don’t understand, and there is nothing ignoble about this.
Ignobility becomes a factor when individuals report that certain basic discoveries are worthy of pomp and circumstance. Furthermore, much of the scientific research to do with biological chemistry, medicine, and human physiology suffers because of small sample sizes, a failure to study both genders, and too similar ethnic groupings. It’s impossible to make extrapolations about seven billion people when researchers only study 20 white, male university students.
We live in a difficult world. Illness, disease, and pestilence plague our civilization, and we’re lucky enough to live in a world where science is not persecuted – where an educated few are more capable than ever to make a difference. However, in our haste, we become far too eager to talk about solutions that have yet to be proven to really solve anything. We face a crisis of corroboration, and the only way to overcome this issue is by slowing down and accepting that not all of our problems can be solved at the click instantaneous of a button.