Scientific papers are riddled with errors; for example, as many as 30 percent of cluster randomized controlled trials for childhood obesity may have been analyzed incorrectly. In psychology, 20 percent of studies or more may have inconsistencies with their basic descriptive statistics that shed doubt on the reliability of their findings.
For example, in the early 19th century, based on obviously bad sampling, physicians misdiagnosed many healthy infants with "enlarged" thymuses and mistakenly believed they were responsible for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by occluding the trachea, leading to a century-long medical misconception. The error was finally recognized and corrected in the 1940s. However, a nationwide campaign was only launched in 1977 by the National Cancer Institute to warn the medical community and alert the public.
Serious errors occur in social science publications, too. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published influential research in 2010 suggesting that when a country’s debt surpasses 90 percent of its gross domestic product, economic growth declines. Broadly cited by political leaders, this finding famously supported austerity policies worldwide. Independent researchers later uncovered significant errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s calculations. The blunder omitted key data from five countries, reversing the findings to show an average growth increase, rather than decline, at high debt levels.
