Using Pokémon to detect scientific misinformation
If you publish a paper with fake 'good' data, why would some spurrious animal names even be relevant? 'Zubat'? Epidemiologists probably don't know the English-Chinese translation for the million species in China.This is not really spoofing, this is just plain fraud, right?When they fill papers full of jargon, data that doesn't make sense, crazy political posturing so that the paper reads as something fantastical - and it gets by - that's a problem.But this seems to be merely a real concern that it's quite a bit of work to reproduce scientific results and that someone doing a quick review of a paper has no material way of validating 'everything'.The paper 'looked promising' because it was promising, assuming those sending it in weren't completely making everything up.You could make a fake passport that might fool a lot of people, that doesn't mean the system is broken.Science maybe has problems but I'm not sure this one strikes at it very well.