Quote:
Originally Posted by Granity
Medical research, the most fraudulent thing there is in the scientific community, it also ranks along side climate science for 'bad' science:
From:
Abstract
A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes.
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications |
But 2000 articles is a drop in the ocean in comparison with all medical articles. Expecting 100% of humanity to be honest/competent is unrealistic, and that is true of published scientific researchers too. Much worse than the problem you mention is meddling by drugs companies to suppress unhelpful results. On the other hand, nearly all of CAM articles are of poor quality. Whereas, despite the problems of fraud and conflicts of interest, mainstream medicine has been responsible for great reductions in disease mortality.
However I would agree that research of the form "X foodstuff is good for you" tends to be pretty rubbish.
Climate science does indeed attract a lot of pseudo-scientists, but they tend to have difficulty getting published in peer-reviewed journals.