David Wootton

How far can we trust the men in lab coats?

Stuart Ritchie describes an epidemic of fraud in scientific research. But in fact standards have much improved over the past decade

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issue 11 July 2020

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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