It is rare that one is able to publish a book as timely, given the confusion and hysteria surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, as Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, which is about malfeasance in contemporary natural and social sciences. Ritchie, a psychology lecturer at King’s College London, has written a prescient and absorbing book regarding the replication crisis, the imperfect peer-review process, and scientific misdeeds. It manages to balance conversational prose with what is in many ways an academic literature review distilled for the educated public. While Science Fictions certainly contributes to a greater understanding of some of the worrisome issues surrounding contemporary science, it is not without its omissions and faults.
To be clear at the outset, Ritchie emphatically believes that science contains objective truth, discerned through “scrutiny, questioning, revision, refinement and consensus.” When Ritchie illustrates scientific malfeasance through a large number of case studies, it is clear that for each of these, at least one of the five aspects of the scientific modus operandi has been violated. This is not to say that science has not been amazingly successful in many respects—electricity, spacecraft, and vaccines, to name just a few. Indeed, science’s successes are, in part, what make it so susceptible to what Richie identifies as its four main problems: fraud, bias, negligence, and hype.
Distorting the Scientific Method
Scientific inquiry depends on the ability to continually retest hypotheses by replication. Yet a shocking number of scientific papers fail this test. How bad is the problem? Ritchie gives some distressing numbers in a myriad of fields. For example, in 2018 there was an attempt to replicate 21 social science papers that were published in the two most prestigious science journals, Nature and Science: the replication rate was 62 percent. Alas, the social sciences are not alone. A study from 2016 found that of 268 randomly sampled biomedical papers, including clinical trials, only one of them reported its full protocol. This means that a scientist could not even attempt to replicate 267 of these studies. Replication crisis, indeed.
Ritchie takes us on a tour of fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. Whilst discussing fraud, he points the reader to the website Retraction Watch. (As I write this, the banner blares, “The list of retracted COVID-19 papers is up to 33.”) There have been over 18,000 retractions in the scientific literature since the 1970s, and a number of these papers are, despite their retraction, still cited positively out of ignorance. Ritchie homes in on a number of case studies that illustrate the myriad scientific sins committed by such papers. We learn about the defrocked-physician Andrew Wakefield who made up a link between vaccines and autism in the respected peer-reviewed journal The Lancet for financial gain. There is the spreadsheet error that made it into Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s peer-reviewed paper in American Economic Review. In the original paper, they stated that any country with a debt-to-GDP ratio above 90 percent, should go through austerity during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As it turns out, once the error was fixed in the spreadsheet, the 90 percent threshold was no more. A peer-review crisis, indeed, in addition to the replication crisis!
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