Shamed Scientist's Work Fills Web
Kristen Philipkoski,
Wired News,
Nov 01, 2002
It's a good issue with the potential for bad solutions. Eight of Hendrik Schon's discredited research papers on Thursday were retracted by the journal Science after it was discovered that he used fabricated data. But copies of the work linger around the web. Thus there is no way for people to know that the work was discredited. Sure, the pages could all be removed, but then there is no evidence at all (which would raise more uestions than it answered). This article appears to suggest some means of marking the pages themselves. I'm not happy with that either, mostly because of the impracticality of the solution (sure, webmasters can track the famous cases, but not the obscure). I'm not sure it's such a big issue: I'm sure nobody is going around ripping out pages of Science or annotating them with a black felt marker. Prudent research on the web as elsewhere involves checking your sources. A very quick scan (one much more easily accomplished than in a library) would reveal the truth about Schon's work.
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