A month ago the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine each retracted a major study on Covid-19 drug therapies. One article had been up for more than a month, the other for less than two weeks. Both were based on faked data. That the rush to publish on Covid-19 led established researchers, reviewers and journals to skip elementary checks is deplorable, if not entirely surprising. But is there a more deep-seated crisis in scientific research? Stuart Ritchie claims an epidemic of ‘fraud, bias, negligence, and hype’. Alas, he overhypes his own argument.
In 2011 this book would have been a wonderful path-breaker. Back then, a reputable psychology journal published an article claiming undergraduates could predict an image that was about to appear on their computer screen, but, oddly, only if it was pornographic. Ritchie, then a PhD student, tried to replicate this experiment, but the journal refused to publish his report that replication was (surprise, surprise) impossible.
We may wonder how a serious journal could expect its readers to believe in time-travelling porn; but at least Ritchie would now have no trouble publishing his report on a replication failure. Times have changed. Indeed his book is best read not as a call for radical change but as a guide to the revolution in the culture of science that has taken place over the past decade.
Unfortunately scientists, including Ritchie, remain more than a little naive about their own disciplines. They are shocked and horrified when there is evidence of fraud; yet even Newton and Pasteur cheated on their results. They are puzzled when, in psychology, only 65 per cent of experiments can be successfully replicated (a figure that rises sharply to 92 per cent if someone from the original team participates in the replication — a fact Ritchie doesn’t mention).
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