4 ms·
They did publish a paper the numbers within which were not reviewed by anyone. I, along with others, have been under the impression that such things are indeed
by yostrovs 6y ago
They did publish a paper the numbers within which were not reviewed by anyone. I, along with others, have been under the impression that such things are indeed double checked by other scientists reviewing papers.
Turns out they are not.
- saalweachter 6y agoI'm not saying this isn't a black mark on a prestigious journal, or that someone isn't getting chewed out by their boss for failing to catch this problem in pre-publication reviews, but ... mistakes are always going to happen. As much as we all eagerly drool over and discuss the latest publications -- on this very website! -- in everything from astrophysics to medicine, something being in published in a prestigious journal is not the gold stamp that it is true. It's just the middle of the process; the reviewers thought it was interesting enough -- and not fraudulent! -- to share with the scientific community at large, and now everyone will examine it, poke holes in it, or try to build on it. A lot of things are published in journals that end up being wrong. Most of the time it's not fraud, it's just some combination of math errors, experimental errors, and statistical flukes. And back to the original point: you can find dozens, hundreds of articles published five, ten, twenty years ago that say all sorts of amazing and outlandish things, published in sufficiently minor journals that they didn't receive sufficient attention or follow-up work. Don't take them as gospel just because they got published: you need to study the entire body of scientific research on a subject to understand what the consensus is on what's probably true, what's probably not, and what's in the nebulous zone of unknown.