To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting
This is an excellent overview article on an important topic. It mentions many of the most influential authors on the topic of accuracy of scientific publications.<p>Hacker News readers may enjoy "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[1] by Peter Norvig, a LISP hacker who is now director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Norvig's essay is my all-time favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment. That's because we see submissions here every day of preliminary studies that can be analyzed by Norvig's checklist on research issues to look for when reading about a scientific finding.<p>I discuss psychology research weekly with a group of psychologists who study human behavior genetics in a "journal club" (graduate seminar course). Those researchers have told me about other researchers who are trying to clean up the published literature in psychology, for example Jelte Wicherts, whose article "Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science"[2] in an open-access journal suggests general procedures to improve scientific publishing, for example by changing the incentive structure around reviewing papers submitted for publication. Another helpful researcher on statistical tests to verify results is Uri Simonsohn. The papers he and his colleagues produce[3] are thought-provoking, pointed, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.<p>[1] <a href="http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html</a><p>[2] Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020<p><a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full" rel="nofollow">http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/" rel="nofollow">http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/</a>