The promulgation of fraud is an outrage, striking at the moral roots of the scientific enterprise. But its moral stridency is large, I submit, compared to its practical importance in most scientific fields. A much larger toll is exacted from inadequate experimental design and sloppy execution. The lost effort that is expended in straightening out muddy claims, or merely in plowing through their presentation in the literature, greatly exceeds what can be attributed to intentional fraud.
We do not rely entirely on the intrinsic virtue of the scientific personality. We are all human, and not equally socialized into the deepest respect for the truth, nor equally well trained to avoid even simple logical and statistical fallacies. It is the scientific system of organized skepticism, to borrow Robert K. Merton's phrase, that maintains the integrity of the enterprise.
Scientific claims enter into a cognitive network of great complexity. Rarely is work ...
