This really isn't suitable for another "On Science" post as it's really not concerned much with the intersection between science and faith in the sense the previous posts were. But of course when it rains it pours, and in listening to the radio this morning, there was a really interesting news bit about peer review and publication retractions.
They referenced an interesting site, Retraction Watch, which provides a sort of monitoring service for paper retractions. There was an interesting note in the media segment in which a contributor mentioned a study on retracted papers. The study found that after a paper was retracted from Science or Nature, future papers still cited the retracted paper 17 times more than the retraction.
There's a question here about whether peer review is really doing its job. Even assuming retractions happen because of current work (rather than fraud or more nefarious reasons), it's interesting that publications more frequently cite discredited research than the research discrediting it.
This reminded me some of the 2009 East Anglia global warming scandal, at least insofar as that scandal did more damage to peer review than it did to anything else.
In the final analysis, at the very least it suggests that we ought be more careful about quoting science and studies without being careful about their contents—and what's most recently been discovered.
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