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.
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