“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”
COSMOS 13 part television series – Carl Sagan
Science’s main strength is that it is self-correcting. Unfortunately, there are also people who are deliberately putting mistakes in the body of science. People who plagiarize, falsify, or completely fabricate data for scientific publications. It is very interesting, albeit often excruciating and sobering, to see the self-correcting process at work in these cases.
Two blogs I can highly recommend track fraud and retractions in science:
- Retraction Watch (http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com)
- Science Fraud (http://www.science-fraud.org) [Update: shut down]
Chances are, if you are working in science, sooner or later someone from your discipline will be among the postings. And even if not, it is enlightening to see what happens in other disciplines or science in general.
Personally I have added the RSS Feeds of both blogs to my DEVONthink database and treat them like I would treat any interesting journal: Check periodically and read the … interesting bits.
