[Cicero]

Well, actually, you have to admire the honesty and remarkable speed with which these papers seem to have been retracted. Usually when this happens things go back and forth for years, the perp never confesses, and everybody pretends not to know whether it was fraudulent or not. And the whistle-blower probably loses his job.

What Haddon says is perfectly plausible. He contributed to an idea that another scientist seemingly took further, so he thought he deserved to be listed as a co-author. Probably he didn't have the lab setup required to check out Schon's supposed findings so he accepted them on good faith.

Hundreds of thousands of technical papers come out, and no one can read or check all of them. So fraud may not be suspected until someone tries to duplicate an experiment or make further use of an idea.

At least Haddon had some reason to allow his name to appear as co-author, because he thought he had contributed to a discovery. As an outsider I am somewhat more bewildered by cases where senior scientists or lab heads take credit from junior ones although they had no actual input at all into the experiments. But I suppose if scientists think that's OK there's no point in arguing with them.

[aruanan]

Probably he didn't have the lab setup required to check out Schon's supposed findings so he accepted them on good faith.

Reviewers of papers don't perform the experiments in the paper they are reviewing in order to evaluate the findings. They rely on their previous experience, their knowledge of the field, and their own expectations to judge whether the conclusions of the paper they are reviewing are likely to be supported by the results of the experiments presented in the paper. The usual presentation is 1. background, 2. methods, 3. results, 4. interpretation, 5. conclusions.

A valid review of a paper depends on the honesty of the researcher in the presentation of his data and the competence of the reviewer in assessing the presentation of the data. It also depends on the honesty of the reviewer. One hopes that the reviewer won't torpedo an otherwise good paper because it presents results that contradict the reviewer's own work or scoops the reviewer's own work or gives him the information he needs to bring his own work to completion or simply goes against the reviewer's own theoretical biases (see what Big Bang acolytes do to people like Halton Arp).

The entire enterprise depends on people are smart, highly competitive, and ever mindful of their position in the professional hierarchy. Without honesty and integrity, it's all meaningless. This is why the judgment is often swift and harsh when scientific fraud is uncovered.