A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.

“The journals do the bare minimum,” said Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and image expert who described Dr. Yoon’s papers as showing a worrisome pattern of copied or doctored data. “There’s no oversight.”
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Dr. Yoon, a stomach cancer specialist and a proponent of robotic surgery, kept climbing the academic ranks, bringing his junior researcher along with him. In September 2021, around the time the study was published, he joined Columbia, which celebrated his prolific research output in a news release. His work was financed in part by half a million dollars in federal research money that year, adding to a career haul of nearly $5 million in federal funds.

The decision by the stomach cancer study’s publisher, Elsevier, not to post an explanation for the paper’s removal made it less likely that the episode would draw public attention or affect the duo’s work. That very study continued to be cited in papers by other scientists.
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And as recently as last year, Dr. Yoon’s lab published more studiescontaining identical images that were said to depict separate experiments, according to Dr. David’s analyses.

The researchers’ suspicious publications stretch back 16 years. Over time, relatively minor image copies in papers by Dr. Yoon gave way to more serious discrepancies in studies he collaborated on with Changhwan Yoon, Dr. David said. The pair, who are not related, began publishing articles together around 2013.
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The journals do the bare minimum
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Ha! If only they did. As we've seen, many won't even correct obvious mistakes once pointed out, because it's only when they correct that it makes them look bad. In cases like Cochrane, they will even double down on publishing something harmful again, renewing its influence, then work to stall even after they admit that what they published is flawed. This is far far below the bare minimum, it's dysfunctional to the point where the system simply cannot be trusted as it is.

AIs capable of doing reviews of scientific papers are coming soon. Maybe as soon as this year. Once ready, it will be trivial to basically review the entire academic literature. All of it. The results will be shocking. Even more shocking will be how obvious many of the flaws are and how they are commonly defended even after they're caught.

In a way this is kind of to be expected. The idea of peer review is nonsensical when you consider that all important human behavior requires oversight. Peer review is explicitly not oversight. Such a system can work out, in software development we commonly do code reviews, but the way it's done is explicitly broken in academic peer review. And that's on top of the for-profit paywalled system.
 
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