Scientific Correction Has Failed

How Covid-19 has exposed the cracks in the system

Pictured: Science, probably. Given that I dropped physics in my final year of school and haven’t been in an actual laboratory for a decade, I could be wrong. Source: Pexels

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.

Pictured: Interesting, but not important to most people. Source: Pexels

A lot of science is like that — it is deeply, passionately important to a small group of people, but has little impact on the rest of the world aside from a few relatively minor interactions. The seriously important papers tend to be heavily regulated, and thus harder to fake — think drug trials, or international collaborations — and when they do sneak through they’re so famous that people notice how bad they are almost immediately. The fact that it can take 5 years for a journal to even listen to concerns about fake data may not be a direct issue if that research is deeply obscure anyway.

And then a pandemic came along, and everything changed.

Science In A Crisis

The Covid-19 pandemic has well and truly upended the scientific order. Preprints, which prior to Covid-19 were more of a tool for the especially rigorous scientists to get feedback on their early work, are now one of the primary methods that science is communicated to the…