Invalid science
Invalid science consists of scientific claims based on experiments that cannot be reproduced or that are contradicted by experiments that can be reproduced. Recent analyses indicate that the proportion of retracted claims in the scientific literature is steadily increasing. The number of retractions has grown tenfold over the past decade, but they still make up approximately 0.2% of the 1.4m papers published annually in scholarly journals. The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), investigates scientific misconduct. Science magazine ranked first for the number of articles retracted at 70, just edging out PNAS, which retracted 69. Thirty-two of Science's retractions were due to fraud or suspected fraud, and 37 to error. A subsequent "retraction index" indicated that journals with relatively high impact factors, such as Science, Nature and Cell, had a higher rate of retractions. Under 0.1% of papers in PubMed had were retracted of more than 25 million papers going back to the 1940s. The fraction of retracted papers due to scientific misconduct was estimated at two-thirds, according to studies of 2047 papers published since 1977. Misconducted included fraud and plagiarism. Another one-fifth were retracted because of mistakes, and the rest were pulled for unknown or other reasons. A separate study analyzed 432 claims of genetic links for various health risks that vary between men and women. Only one of these claims proved to be consistently reproducible. Another meta review, found that of the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect. In 2012 biotech firm Amgen was able to reproduce just six of 53 important studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, successfully repeated only one fourth of 67 important papers. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
