The Academic Junk Science Scandal Continues to Unfold
What good is "science" if the scientists are corrupt?
by Patrick Cox
November 26, 2018
One of the most important developments of the past decade is the emergence of evidence that many—if not most—published academic studies are worthless, or worse.
This phenomenon is called the reproducibility or replication crisis. I think it should have been labeled the “academic science scam.”
The sorry state of academic research was already known to real scientists, but the topic was taboo. For obvious reasons, researchers who needed relationships with university scientists were motivated to keep their mouths shut about problems they had discovered in published research. A scientist might publish a study that contained evidence refuting a prior study, but the unofficial guild of research scientists tried to keep accusations of fraud to a minimum.
The term “peer-reviewed” used to endow scientific papers with the status of a 16th-century papal encyclical.
Those days are over.
The event that broke this omertà, or code of silence, was a 2012 paper by Dr. C. Glen…
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