Saturday, January 07, 2006

The Best Thing To Happen To Science?

It's old news about Woo Suk Hwang and his bogus SCIENCE articles. To be honest though, I really do think that this type of fraud is more prevalent than people think. It also shows the need for the current scientific review system to be revamped. I recently spoke with an editor at the Phys Rev, and he told me that a HUGE proportion of articles received are completely bogus, but most don't get past the editors on to reviewers. So what I find most distressing about this entire debacle is not that Hwang 'invented' his data, but that it got past the editors AND the reviewers. That is the cause for alarm. People just never learned from the Sokal Hoax, have they?

No comments: