Daniel Sarewitz in Nature
The quality problem has been widely recognized in cancer science, in which many cell lines used for research turn out to be contaminated. For example, a breast-cancer cell line used in more than 1,000 published studies actually turned out to have been a melanoma cell line. The average biomedical research paper gets cited between 10 and 20 times in 5 years, and as many as one-third of all cell lines used in research are thought to be contaminated, so the arithmetic is easy enough to do: by one estimate, 10,000 published papers a year cite work based on contaminated cancer cell lines. Metastasis has spread to the cancer literature……..That problem is likely to be worse in policy-relevant fields such as nutrition, education, epidemiology and economics, in which the science is often uncertain and the societal stakes can be high
See this great piece by Bruce Charlton
Professional science has arrived at this state in which the typical researcher feels free to indulge in unrestrained careerism, while blandly assuming that the ‘systems’ of science will somehow transmute the dross of his own contribution into the gold of truth. It does not: hence the preponderance of irreproducible publications.