Wall Street Journal front page: “Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge”

The 10 August Wall Street Journal front page reported that “retractions of scientific studies are surging” and that since 2001, “while the number of papers published in research journals has risen 44%, the number retracted has leapt more than 15-fold.”

The exposé generally does not try to keep readers aware that the alleged problems lie mainly in biomedicine, though it does use three anecdotal stories from biomedicine as examples. It offers at best only minimal clarification of the tiny proportions of absolute numbers of retractions among the huge numbers of papers actually published. And it leaves mostly unclarified the condemnation’s at best tiny applicability to physics.

The article prominently presents a multiple-section bar graph under the heading “Spurious Science.” Two sections of this visual tabulation, if studied even briefly, reveal the tiny extent to which physics actually falls under such a heading. One column of bars reports that “retractions are rising across most fields,” but the biomedical numbers represented at the top dwarf the physical science numbers at the bottom.

Another column—with similar structure, revelations and proportions—addresses “the most influential journals.” It risks seeming ludicrous by including, among four cited physics publications, one for which the two bits of information are: zero retractions for 2001-2005 and zero retractions for 2006-2010. (It’s Astrophysical Journal. The other three, all with low numbers, are Physical Review Letters, Physical Review B and Applied Physics Letters.)

Given the potential cascade of negative consequences for patients from faulty medical science, no doubt the article is justified in calling attention to a retractions problem. But it’s presented as if the problem deeply afflicts all of science. The final line, in fact, quotes the editor of the Lancet: “The apparent rise in scientific fraud, said Dr. Horton ‘is a scar on the moral body of science.’”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.