The Fraudulent Laboratory – Theodore Dalrymple

When I was young and naïve, the thought never occurred to me that what appeared in medical journals might be fraudulent.

I knew there had been scientific hoaxes, such as the Piltdown Man , and I knew that, man being fallible, mistakes were made.

But still, I never suspected outright fraud. I was too optimistic. I decided to read one of the most respected of all medical publications, the New England Journal of Medicine , more closely, line by line.

There is no simple answer to this question: does retraction work? A recent post on Retraction Watch suggests that it does sometimes work.

The incentives to scientific fraud, and the ease with which it is committed, have never been greater.

An assessment of the effect of retraction is impossible, and depends on counterfactual: would the paper have been cited more (or possibly fewer) times if it had not been retracted?.