Bad News and Good News
The bad news is, retractions of scientific papers have risen tenfold since 1990. The good news is, the rate has gone from 0.0007% to 0.007%. Going back to bad news, though, some estimates of how many papers ought to be retracted are around 1%, so we still have a long way to go.
Very few scientific papers have serious errors. Many are sort of irrelevant or say nothing much. Face it, folks, reviewers and editors have to help their academic friends get tenure and their bureacratic friends get promotions. Favor trading extends far beyond the sciences. What is really unethical is that some reviewers trash the works of their rivals and these often are at least mediocre and sometime very good. Citations are also a traded commodity.
Foster Morrison
2009/08/24 at 19:43