How reliable is science? Zombie papers (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Monday, May 02, 2016, 14:25 (2913 days ago) @ David Turell

Apparently there are fraudulent research papers, but there are also papers with 'honest' mistakes, unnoticed errors that persist until there is a review of the methods. Peer reviewers can easily miss them and the papers with their errors stay in the literature and many are cited over and over. What to do is a current problem:-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45868/title/The-Zombie-Literature/&utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TS_The-Scientist-Daily_2016&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=29139068&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-95VtFmITjbpVp6az3PTsMq53bwpVy3UaEZuHWmg_1DXrSX63bTJupIMVmHqFSN4PekOmgNcT1ot3SneqOnyD7u661ZfA&_hsmi=29139068/-"But while cases of misconduct and subsequent retractions headline a growing reproducibility problem in the sciences, they actually represent a relatively small number of the flawed studies out there. The vast majority of publications that reported inaccurate results, used impure cell cultures, relied on faulty antibodies, or analyzed contaminated DNA are not the result of wrongdoing, but of honest mistakes, and many such papers persist in the scientific literature uncorrected.-***-"Are these “zombie papers” (to repurpose a term coined by academic publishing watchdog Leonid Schneider) benign—relics of antiquated methodologies or poor reagents that serve as a historical record for the field of inquiry? Or are they worrisome enough to be hunted down and excised from the body of the scientific literature altogether, in the same way that intentionally falsified reports are?-"Many researchers argue for the latter. Flawed papers, especially those that become highly cited, run the danger of perpetuating faulty methods or conclusions, sending funding and effort in fruitless directions, and building layers of theory upon shaky conceptual foundations. In this way, zombie papers can spawn more zombie publications, and the damage can be amplified and spread in an infectious pattern.-“'It is a big problem, and it is a pervasive problem,” says Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist and cofounder/executive director of the Center for Open Science. Just how big remains unclear, but Gelman estimates that flawed publications may outnumber the good ones.-
***-"And the zombie horde will only continue to grow as ever more journals churn out reams of scientific papers at an increasing rate. Nosek and Gelman are critical of traditional scientific publishing, which has remained essentially unchanged for centuries. They and others say it's time to modernize the process. Over the past couple of years, researchers have begun to implement new mechanisms and avenues to review, flag, correct, and annotate the scientific literature. In the future, some hope, the way that researchers and publishers interact with each other and the body of work they generate could be radically transformed.-“'There is certainly evolution in how people are thinking about these issues,” Nosek says, “and what role publishers then would play if there was more responsivity to evidence as it accumulates rather than just the static record of what was thought at that particular time.”-***-"Allison says, the scientific community would need to overhaul its whole concept of who actually owns data and research findings. “You're in charge of it for a while, but it's really the public's data,” he says. “And this [change] won't happen overnight.”-"So while zombie papers, such as Pääbo's mummy DNA study, the arsenic-life paper, and many others too numerous to mention here, will likely live on in the scientific literature, there is a glimmer of hope that, as science adopts a more modern model for publishing and revising results, making papers more dynamic and less static, we may see a downtick in recruitment to the zombie hordes."-Comment: At least the problem is recognized and solutions are sought, just as peer review is being strongly questioned.