What do you think about this article?
"How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science"
http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-trouble-with-scientists
or related articles such as "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/sta306bfiles/ioan.pdf
Science results from human activities, and to err is human.
Science is a special case of human activity: it requires humans to make statements specific enough to be disproved.
Statements that cannot be proved are not scientific (are not part of science).
In the end, errors will be sourced out to the scientific nirvana: ether, phlogiston, cold fusion - you name it.
My initial ideas regarding the original question:
The first article presents a number of anecdotes in a feature form. The idea, borrowed from pharmacology, to register your research project first with methods and expected results may work for "simple" research questions (dispense drug, see condition) but would fail for projects like SETI to lead to better, or more transparent, research.
Nevertheless, it can be reasonable to follow this idea for projects that can be layed out in a clear A-B-C way and which may be biased by other interests (tenure, funders). The link below shows an approach to this kind of transparent and effective research.
To be more scientific, do we have reliable data on the extent and number of such events that have been reported as anecdotes in this article by a psychologist?
http://www.myexperiment.org/about
After all, it seems to work eventually - even if the peer revew itself is flawed:
see this link http://www.springer.com/gb/about-springer/media/statements/retraction-of-articles-from-springer-journals/735218
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