The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the past half-century.
That alarms us. Because in medicine, nearly everything we do is based on evidence. And the evidence that is weighed most heavily are the data published in our field’s top journals.
Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the Retraction Watch blog, discusses the scientific process, what can go wrong, and the differences between misconduct and honest mistakes
When the Internet began to take off in the mid-1990’s, it created the opportunity to do something scholars had been dreaming of for millennia — to gather all of the writings of scholars past and present together in a single online public library — a free, globally accessible version of the ancient library in Alexandria. But 20 years on and we are barely any closer to achieving this goal.
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