“HOW SCIENCE GOES WRONG”.

“HOW SCIENCE GOES WRONG”. I have posted a number of times about the need for journals of negative results—something my brother Elmer used to call for some 50 years ago. It is encouraging that the problems of replication, retraction, and the publishing of negative results are getting a lot more attention. There is even, as I posted on here, a blog devoted to publishing retractions—the Retraction Watch blog. Yet there is still a long way to go. The issue of the Economist for October 19th to October 25th had on its cover in giant letters: “HOW SCIENCE GOES WRONG”.The Economist cover story gives an idea of the scale of the problems. It says that retraction studies are still estimated to make up no more than 0.2% of scholarly papers and that “Negative results account for just 10-30% of published scientific literature….” Things may be getting worse. One study of 4,600 papers from across the sciences “found that the proportion of negative results dropped from 30% to 14% between 1990 and 2007.”