The Foundation Warentest on Science is called in the USA "Retraction Watch"
Although the scientific method is the best to recognize the reality, but also science takes place in a social environment. This social environment uses the capitalist production and competition force for science in the maxim "Publish or perish". Mullabfuhr for the Rubbish, which arises too often (skimmed, not wrong), operate u.a. The makers of Retraction Watch.
"Science has found, found, found that marmalade liquor contains, schnapps e-hent hold" – The old, doofe children’s song unfortunately describes today – and sometimes more and more appropriate – such as science, if it does not work, then after all. It is long known to read that scientific sensational messages in print media are likely to be read on the first page, while the discovery of scientific errors, sloppiness and confidence is unfortunately dealt with a short note on page 17 – from falling, which are even sensational staked. "Too many allegations, too little criticism" – This is for a long time not only for the reports about science, but for the reports of scientists and scientists via their work itself.
After all, it is a little easier in the net to give the criticism a voice. And that’s exactly what the two science journalists Ivan Ovransky and Adam Marcus have done with their Blog Retraction Watch. Marcus is a science journalist and boss from the service of Anesthesiology News Ovransky has a comparable position in the medical news specialized branch of Reuters news agency.
Both operate their blog since August 2010, which has a topic of a topic: scientific studies that have to be accessed due to errors, stylusies, or conscious exchanges. For their exhausting hobby, which requires you the skills of science journalists and detectives, give you several reason.
Notorious data false
First, so say, the science is proud of that you can correct yourself (among other things through the revision of false or ubooted studies), but Ovransky and Marcus often takes that too long. "The Lancet" needed twelve years to "study" Andrew Wakefields to bring back to the alleged relationship between vaccinations and autism, which was so faulty that Wakefield was called as a doctor’s prohibition of vocational ban in the Great Britain after the whole of his manipulation became known.
Second, news disappears to often often disappear into databases for specialists, which hinders their dissemination. Third, Ovransky and Marcus are the stories that are behind the failed studies often just good. The latter point can only be agreed if you pick up the raisins out of your blog.
For example, the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stack, from which the considerable number of 28 auditants had to be accessed so far. He is now known as a notorious data false, and will have to answer in the Netherlands in court because he also used folded data to get to state receivables. Should he be convicted of a prison sentence, then Ovransky and Marcus, he became a new member in a pretty exclusive club.
Your knowledge has so far only two more scientists landed because of similar passes in jail: Eric Poehlman and Scott Reuben.
Correction of own errors of all honors
Or how goods with news about people who are stupid enough to make research papers at the effectiveness of two different medications with the same data, and let themselves caught because they are not even able to reformulate the relevant texts?
At all this is important to note that errors and correction are a central component of the scientific method. So the makers of the Retraction Watch rightly throw that the draft correction of their own errors is worthy of all honor and increases the creditancy of the scientists concerned. Ovransky and Marcus Zitere the case of Nathan Georgette, a very young researcher who took back one of his papers on herd immunitat in early October because he had recognized that the mathematical model on which his conclusions were due was faulty.
By the Georgette (who, by the way, can also wait for the topic of Open Access), for its openness to praise, follow Ovransky and Marcus implicitly a maxim of the physicist Richard Feynman, who once meant meaningful: the key to scientific work is the usage to have made a mistake.
And that’s why publications such as retraction watch and institutions such as the Cochrane centers are trying to determine the value of scientific studies with the methods of meta analysis, so important. Sprews and wheats are not separated by themselves in science – on the contrary, under economic prere the risk of deliberate and unconscious mixing. You can thank you that there are people who help sort.