For the past couple of years there have been many youtube videos about recently uncovered scientific frauds. Most of these frauds are related to psychology and sociology papers, and a few of them are related to medicine and a few other subjects.
Many of these frauds, especially those relating to psychology and sociology, consist of the author skewing or manipulating results, engaging in (demonstrably deliberate) selection bias, or just outright fabricating results out of thin air, in order to confirm a particular hypothesis (eg. related to how the average person behaves or thinks in a particular situation). Sometimes the paper might reference a survey that was never actually conducted, or it may present numbers that have been deliberately manipulated by the author. Sometimes the completely wrong conclusion is drawn from the provided data. Sometimes some data is just outright ignored in order to reach a particular conclusion. Sometimes there is no evidence that the data is based on an actual measurement or survey rather than having been just made up by the author.
And we are not here talking about attempted frauds that got caught in the process of publication. We are talking about papers that were published in credible scientific journals, and were caught only many years later (sometimes even decades later).
How is this possible? Isn't the scientific process supposed to work in a manner that catches such fraud before it's actually published and accepted? Isn't the scientific method supposed to maximize the reliability of such results?
Well, it's not the scientific process that's at fault here.
The fault is in the scientific publications themselves. The problem is that they often bypass that scientific process. They are often lazy and skip many steps that they really shouldn't be skipping, especially when the paper is published by a "reliable" author working at a "credible" institution (usually a high-end world-famous university).
What are these steps that these publications are skipping? Mostly two of the most fundamental core pillars of scientific inquiry: Peer review and the repetition of experiments by independent third-parties.
Pretty much invariably you'll find out that especially the latter one has been completely skipped with all these fraudulent papers. The scientific publication simply trusted a single author, and published the paper without demanding nor waiting for an independent third-party to repeat the experiment to see if it gets the same results.
In most cases also the peer-reviewing process turned out to be shoddy and fast-tracked, and lazily done. Of course peer-reviewing alone cannot discover (in most cases) if the data presented in the paper was just fabricated by the author. However, also the papers where the conclusions didn't match the presented data, or there were some clear problems with the presented data (such as values that do not make sense or are way too suspicious), also passed peer review. Which just goes to show that the review was done shoddily and lazily... if at all. (I wouldn't be surprised that if the paper was written by some known "reliable" scientist, peer reviewers tend to skim through the paper without paying too much attention to the details.)
So, in principle the scientific process is relatively reliable. The problem is that it's not being strictly followed, even by many of the biggest scientific publications and journals.
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