Within the scientific community, the peer-review process is widely held to be the gold standard of reliability and veracity, offering readers a degree of confidence lesser papers simply can’t muster.
And so last month when The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals, announced a promising COVID-19 treatment had been proven to be not only ineffective, but also a danger to anyone taking it, the ramifications were swift and far-reaching.
News stories like this show science cheating isn’t a victimless crime – especially during a pandemic. The entirety of science suffers. We have included links to 19 related items.
Two weeks later, however, the paper was embarrassingly withdrawn because the data could not be verified, and may well be false. Given the stakes involved with a global pandemic, it’s one of the biggest scientific humiliations in recent memory.
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