Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple delves into the topic of scientific fraud and its apparent upswing in our postmodern age.
In the fight against dishonesty in scientific research, as in the fight against bad ideas, there is no final victory. An interesting question is why some, but not all, fraudulent ideas persist, despite exposure.
It is not clear to me that Raoult’s paper “was of such poor quality that it should never have been published in the first place” and that in the case of his paper retraction has “worked”, when I consider the quality of most medical and epidemiologic research, and in particular the quality of unretracted papers arguing the opposite of what Raoult’s does.