Richard Tol has an excellent summary of the state of the 97% claim by John Cook et al, published in The Australian today.
Don’t ask how bad a paper has to be to get retracted.
Ask how bad it has to be to get published.
As
Tol explains, the Cook et al paper used an unrepresentative sample, can’t be
replicated, and leaves out many useful papers. The study was done by biased observers
who disagreed with each other a third of the time, and disagree with the
authors of those papers nearly two-thirds of the time. About 75% of the papers
in the study were irrelevant in the first place, with nothing to say about the
subject matter. Technically, we could call them “padding”. Cook himself has
admitted data quality is low. He refused to release all his data, and even
threatened legal action to hide it. (The university claimed it would breach a
confidentiality agreement. But in reality, there was no agreement to breach.)
As it happens, the data ended up being public anyhow. Tol refers to an “alleged
hacker” but, my understanding is that no hack took place, and the “secret”
data, that shouldn’t have been a secret, was left on an unguarded server. The
word is “incompetence”, and the phrase is “on every level”.....To Read More......
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