Scientific Correction Has Failed
How Covid-19 has exposed the cracks in the system
This piece covers a new paper by myself and some fantastic colleagues recently published in PLOS Biology. It’s open-access (anyone can read it) and you can find it here.
Before the pandemic, there were well-known issues in science. Peer-review, seen as the stronghold against low-quality research, is notoriously fallible and regularly lets through bad and even fraudulent research. The glacial pace of publication for scientific evidence means that, even when issues have been identified, it often takes years or even decades to get them corrected.
In general, these issues in science have mostly been an issue for minor groups of academics and scientific sleuths. For example, while it has some practical implications for the outcomes of global warming, most of the people who care about fish behavioural changes in water with more carbon dioxide are marine biologists. The fact that some of these papers may have been faked is more a footnote in the conversation about climate change than a real and pressing issue for the average person.
