Ivan:
You know it’s not true.
Elisabeth:
Yes, we both know that. I agree and I think in this particular situation, a pandemic that is unlike something our generation has seen before, there is a great, great need for fast dissemi- nation of science. If you have new findings, it is great that there is a thing called a preprint server where scientists can quickly share their results, with, of course, the caveat that it’s not peer- reviewed yet. It’s unlike the traditional way of publishing papers, which can take months or years. Preprint publishing is a very fast way of spreading your results in a good way so that is what the world needs right now. On the other hand, of course, there’s the caveat that these are brand new results and a good scientist usually thinks about their results to really interpret it well. You have to look at it from all sides and I think with the rushed publication of preprint papers, there is no such thing as carefully thinking about what results might mean. So there’s this delicate balance where on one hand we want to spread results really fast as scientists, but on the other hand, we know it’s incomplete, it’s rushed and it’s not great. This might be hard for the general audience to understand. I still think the benefits of that dissemination are more posi- tive than negative. Right. But there’s also so many papers that come out now on preprint servers and most of them are not that great, but there are some really good studies in there. It’s hard to find those nuggets of really great papers. There’s just a lot of pa- pers that come out now. Well, you’ve made more than a habit of finding problems in papers. These are mostly, of course, until now published papers that you examined, but what is this time like for you? How is it different?
Ivan:
Elisabeth:
Ivan:
WHISTLEBLOWERS:
The Science Sleuths Holding Fraudulent Research Accountable
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