bjoern.brembs.blog » How reliable is the scholarly literature?

"So according to these very (very!) rough estimates, just the two fields of cancer research and psychology together add more than a million unreliable articles to the literature every five years or so. Clearly, those are crude back-of-the-envelope estimates, but they should be sufficient to just get an idea about the orders of magnitude we are talking about.

If the numbers hold that about 2 million articles get published every year, just these two fields would together amount to a whopping 10% of unreliable articles. Other major reproducibility projects in the social sciences and economics yield reproducibility rates in these fields of about 60%. Compare these numbers to a worst case scenario of all papermills together producing some 10k unreliable articles a year. If the scholarly literature really were a sinking boat, fighting papermills would be like trying to empty the boat with a thimble, or plug the smallest hole with a cork.

When will we finally get ourselves a new boat?"