Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

It’s sometimes said, mostly seriously, that Charles Darwin was the last true scientific expert. He knew everything that there was to know at the time about his field of natural history, in no small part due to his global fact-finding voyages and his network of scientific correspondents whom he would – to use his own words – ‘pester with letters’.5 Nowadays, an all-knowing expert like Darwin couldn’t exist in any scientific subject. That’s because we’re now drowning in scientific papers. A modern Darwin would have to keep up with 400,000 or so new studies published annually in the biological and biomedical sciences; across all scientific fields, a snapshot in 2013 found 2.4 million new papers published that year.6 Another analysis, which zoomed out to encompass the entire history of science, showed that the upward trend is accelerating: there was a 0.5% annual growth rate between 1650 and 1750, a 2.4% growth rate between 1750 and 1940, and since then an 8 per cent growth rate. That latter rate means that the entire scientific literature will double in size every nine years.7 In some ways this is a positive development: collectively, humans know vastly more about the world than we did in centuries past. But one has to wonder: is this massive proliferation of papers only a reflection of our growing knowledge?