I really love this description of a retracted study: not only does it explain what was retracted (turns out men don't generally divorce their sick wives), but also it covers what the error was (a coding problem treated people who left the study as divorced) how it all went down (someone tried to replicate, asked for data and didn't get the same analysis. Contacted the authors and they were horrified and immediately worked to retract).
It's a really nice story of why replication matters and how to be good at science. This is how I was taught science should work, but I rarely come across such good retrospectives.
I will say this, even in the face of the comment that already exists here...
People like to say things like "science doesn't work" and then go on to name fraud, commercial interests and so on. Which is all true enough.
But when we find that "science doesn't work" it is because "science" itself found the errors. It was other researchers who tried to replicate, reanalyzed, looked at the books, etc to determine that the results were in question.
Figuring out that "science doesn't work" is part of the process of science. And Retraction Watch is an important part of that!
@MylesRyden @terri Yet, we don't teach students how to do science well. A lot of the bad practices that are behind "bad science" could be mitigated by better teaching of statistics, data analysis, experimental design etc.
