Here's an explanation for why there are so many errors in "peer-reviewed" papers.
1 in 5 chemists have deliberately added errors into their papers during peer review, study finds | Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemical & Engineering News Conclusion is one of many in a report about how chemists handle errors in manuscripts More than 20% of chemistry researchers have deliberately added information they believe to be incorrect into their manuscripts during the peer review process, in order to get their papers published. That’s one conclusion of a study surveying 982 chemistry researchers who were the corresponding authors of at least two papers published in journals of the Royal Society of Chemistry or the American Chemical Society between 2020 and 2023. (ACS publishes C&EN.) The study, published by Accountability in Research, aimed to document how chemists react when they spot errors in other researchers’ studies or their own manuscripts and what action, if any, they take when they do so. When asked if they felt they were forced to modify their manuscript with text they thought to be incorrect, 22% of survey respondents said yes. Study author Frédérique Bordignon, a bibliometrician and research integrity officer at École des ponts ParisTech, says one reason for making such a concession is to wrap up the review process and get a paper published. “It’s a bit concerning,” she says. Most survey respondents—88%—said they had discovered errors in papers when reading them. Out of those who spotted errors, nearly four in five reported taking further action. While most researchers agree that formally correcting the scholarly record is the best practice, that’s often not what they do in practice, Bordignon says. “They prefer off-the-record activities like discussion with other peers,” she says. Among those who took action, 42% mentioned the issue in private conversations to colleagues such as during coffee breaks or at conferences; around a third cited the problematic paper in their own future publication, highlighting the issue; and around 30% mentioned it to students during training courses. While 28% reported talking to or emailing the authors of the problematic paper encouraging them to retract or correct the paper, the study found, 22% chose to simply ignore the error and never cite it. (Many participants were represented in multiple categories, as they reported carrying out more than one action in some instances.) Among other actions, 13% wrote a letter, comment, or note to the journal; 4% started their own replication project; 4% published a formal refutation of the study; and 2% commented on PubPeer, a website where scientists often discuss papers. The survey found that 56% of researchers said errors should be corrected, as a matter of principle; that number rises to 82% when it comes to researchers’ own studies. Meanwhile, a third of survey respondents said an error should be corrected only if it changes the conclusions of the paper. François-Xavier Coudert, a computational chemist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research who was not involved with the study, thinks all errors need to be fixed. “Identifying errors and their cause is often a lengthy and effort-consuming process, so the results should be made available to all readers,” he says. “This is the only way to have more reproducibility in research.” Bordignon says more transparency is needed among chemists. “The problem is, it’s sometimes difficult to face the consequence of being critical of someone else,” she says. “I think we should encourage researchers to be more open to critiques and be more open to flag research of others as well because that’s part of science.” That’s why Bordignon feels chemists should comment on PubPeer more often. Coudert agrees that more postpublication peer review of chemistry studies is needed. “PubPeer is one platform where that can happen, but it is not necessarily the only one,” he says. One way to allow for easier communication of corrections or updates to research is to treat research papers as “living” documents that can be dynamically edited if follow-up work yields new results. “This is exactly what happens with preprints, where all readers know that the ‘final’ published version of the article will be different from the preprint version,” Coudert says.
https://x.com/OwenGregorian/status/1980972775151194352
https://cen.acs.org/policy/publishing/One-five-chemists-deliberately-added/103/web/2025/10
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