My copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (basically an encyclopedia of scientific facts. Things like melting points, conductivity, etc.) has an open

My copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (basically an encyclopedia of scientific facts. Things like melting points, conductivity, etc.) has an opening from the current editor explaining that when he took over as editor he tried to track down the sources of a lot of the data. Unfortunately a lot of the sources for the data wasn’t listed, missing, didn’t seem to exist, or existed but was incorrect. So he undertook a program of re-doing a lot of the studies and finding new, accurate sources. Definitely gave me sort of cyberpunk vibes of “this data just showed up one day and nobody knows where it came from.” Edit: I’ve also run across cases where data is just incorrect and you don’t know how. E.g. a chemical ordered form a supplier is listed as having a solubility of X you the most you can ever get to dissolve is Y and X is something like 13.7 times higher than Y so it’s not like a simple misplaced decimal.