'Trust the Science'? Drug Development, Medical Research Tainted by Scientific Fraud as 10,000 Research Papers Retracted in 2023 Alone (Journal 'Nature')
'Trust the Science'? Drug Development, Medical Research Tainted by Scientific Fraud as 10,000 Research Papers Retracted in 2023 Alone (Journal 'Nature')
“Corruption is creeping into the system,” admits Oxford University professor.
Skyrocketing peer-review fraud has caused a record-breaking 10,000+ sham research papers to be retracted in 2023 alone.
Experts are calling the startling revelation “only the tip of the iceberg.”
Last year’s deluge of fraudulent papers means that the total number of retractions issued so far has passed 50,000, according to a recent Nature analysis.
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This means that medical research and drug development are becoming less trustworthy.
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades.
The majority of 2023’s retractions (more than 8,000) were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley.
Wiley expects to lose out on between $35 million and $40 million in revenue.
Reasons for the retractions cite “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process.”
Even though Hindawi’s retracted papers might have been mostly sham articles, they were still collectively cited more than 35,000 times, Nature emphasizes.
This means that tens of thousands of research projects are relying on faulty data.
Oxford University’s Professor Dorothy Bishop admits “[t]he situation has become appalling.”
“The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields, it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse,” she added.
“People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”
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Aberdeen University’s Professor Alison Avenell explains, “Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money. It is deeply worrying.”
One major problem is that academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.
Bristol University’s Professor Marcus Munafo stated, “If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivized to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm. That is exactly what we have now.”
The alarming rate of fraud calls into question the reliability of the peer review process and the so-called medical “authorities” who cite research papers to advocate certain drug interventions.
For example, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci called on the public to “trust science” regarding government-supported COVID-19 measures, like lockdowns, masks, vaccinations, and social distancing.
In his January testimony before the U.S. House select subcommittee investigating the federal government’s COVID policies, Fauci admitted that some of his “scientific” recommendations during the pandemic were purely arbitrary.
Physician and subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) confirmed that Fauci acknowledged that his “recommendation” that people “socially distance” by six feet to minimize the virus’s transmission was “likely not based on scientific data,” but “sort of just appeared” to him.
This could explain why recent Rasmussen Reports polling shows that most Americans believe it is better to research health topics for oneself than to trust the so-called “experts.”
The poll found that only about a third of Americans think it’s “safe” to take health advice from purported experts.
“[I]n terms of their own health-care decisions, 35% of American Adults believe it’s safe to trust advice from experts,” the poll reads.
On the other hand, the majority of Americans (58%) say “it’s important to do your own research.”
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