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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Just how error-prone and self-correcting is science? We have spent the past 18 months getting a sense of that.

We are a group of researchers working on obesity, nutrition and energetics. In the summer of 2014, one of us (D.B.A.) read a research paper in a well-regarded journal estimating how a change in fast-food consumption would affect children's weight, and he noted that the analysis applied a mathematical model that overestimated effects by more than tenfold. We and others submitted a letter1 to the editor explaining the problem. Months later, we were gratified to learn that the authors had elected to retract their paper. In the face of popular articles proclaiming that science is stumbling, this episode was an affirmation that science is self-correcting.

Sadly, in our experience, the case is not representative. In the course of assembling weekly lists of articles in our field, we began noticing more peer-reviewed articles containing what we call substantial or invalidating errors. These involve factual mistakes or veer substantially from clearly accepted procedures in ways that, if corrected, might alter a paper's conclusions.

http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-a-tragedy-of-errors-1.19264 [nature.com]

Original Submission