Our awareness of errors or mistakes comes unbelievably later than the publications. This is not a news if we scrutinize the history of sciences and technologies. Wrong papers sometimes even serve as a main driving force for us to purse the real truth while we are criticizing them.

Another reason could be the peer-review process, since manuscripts are often reviewed by only handful of reviewers, who may not sufficiently represent the whole community. Therefore, wrong papers are a consequence of ignorance of the authors, the reviewers and the editors involved. However, I believe we readers can verify the results and conclusions in doubt, and point out possible errors for further discussion. This may lead to corrections and update of those wrong papers, or even retractions, as often seen in current peer-reviewed journals.

@ Guorong Weng

Thank you for your ideas.

I agree with them.

• But there is a big problem: several times articles pointing out the errors (Ignorance errors, by authors and Peer Reviewers) are not published; they are immediately rejected

Massimo Sivo

This should be related to politics in academia. Challenging the authority is always a tough nut to crack.

Be open-minded to rejections (just received one hours ago). Thanks to preprint organizers like Arxiv and ChemRxiv, I feel quite supported to publish a contrasting viewpoint, if there is any, without being peer-reviewed. Or we could even say, we are throwing our work to many many more reviewers when preprinting it.

Unfortunately...

There is a wide range from simple typos over programming/calculation errors, instrumental failures and wrong theories to scientific misconduct (data fabrication etc.). Often these errors are hard to detect in a publication. Errors in experiments can best be detected when another group tries to repeat the experiment.

Wolfgang R. Dick

The "wrongness" I refer to is theoretical: probability and statistics show through Theory what is wrong.

If authors do not know the Theory they make errors and find wrong formulae for analysing data.

IF Peer Reviewers do not know the Theory they make errors and do not find the "wrongness" and suggest accepting the papers.

IF Peer Reviewers do not know the Theory they make errors and suggest Rejecting the papers that show the "wrongness".

IF EDITORS do not know the Theory they make errors and Reject the papers that show "wrongness".

Indeed, poor understanding of mathematical statistics is a frequent cause of wrong results. I know such publications with wrong applications, e.g., of statistical tests.

Wolfgang R. Dick and Massimo Sivo made good points

(by the way Massimo Sivo some the remarks refer to some individuals in your university. )

Why are erroneous papers published? Very few papers published because they deliberately spread nonsense. Either they believe in the wrong theory or do not understand the theory I have not done statistical analysis on the percentage but from my anecdotal experience show that most of the time, the believe in the wrong theory and keep updating with new knowledge. Two scenarios that typically happened. One the field split into two groups who believe in the opposite such irreversible thermodynamics. This argument is somewhat legitimate as we do not have solid proofs for one or another. I find myself changing my opinion every once in a while on this topic. There are cases where there are solid proofs and prominent professors from prominent universities like Cambridge still produce papers because they did proper literature review. Furthermore, while they claim that "Challenging Question that my Audience Cannot Answer " and yet they got it wrong for several reasons

mostly lack of proper literature review (and lack of understanding). The most profound case, for the case that the entire field believes in theory that violates the second law of thermodynamics

or Newton laws. This happened in marine engineering. You can say that almost all work on marine engineering is worthless work. No one (almost ) wants to discuss it and hide behind an ignorant facade.

For example, some of them will read this statement and yet they will not dare to challenge it.

Wolfgang R. Dick

Did you highlight those errors?

What was the result?

Thanks

@ Genick Bar-Meir

You say:

• (by the way Massimo Sivo some the remarks refer to some individuals in your university. )

NO. I refer to many papers I read, about Control Charts and Statistics...

In one case I tried to explain the statistical error to the author, but he did not understand my arguments. He became rather angry when a paper by him was not accepted due to my review. Other cases I noted in already published papers were too far from my own field. My experience is that it is usually very time-consuming and often frustrating to get in touch with the authors concerning fundamental errors. It is easier in cases of more simple mistakes, and authors accept corrections to these more readily.

@Wolfgang

It is very interesting how the acceptance of new ideas occurs. When Ohm tried to publish his idea of Ohm's law it was rejected from all the establishment publications and People worked hard to make sure the Ohm could not get any job. So I don't supersize that Dr. Wolfgang has people get angry with him when he explains the fundamentals. In die casting I made a revolution and people worked hard against me. Now when I am basically out of the area about 30 years later it is accepted as the absolute truth. Now going through the similar thing in marine engineering but having some experience of the past. I do the opposite, I shame the people especially the minions and senders to curse me. I publish disputation which no one willing to take me on it. This industry has 5 billion dollars in research grants , so I expect very serious opposition. In the five stages of acceptance, now they are in the third stage of yes but our mistake is small for many and some in the "we never heard about you". So why wrong papers, in this case, are published in this case because the publishing is controlling the industry. Even arXiv is controlled by them and they prevent publishing any wrong ideas. I find the like migrant birds, the "migrant" or transitional scientists tend to agree with me.

Adding to your comments, i have an observation to share. Sometimes, us researchers put a whole lot of key words to describe our area of expertise & most of the time the specific section to which author contributed in a publication is not very clear.

This lack of conciseness towards author's exact expertise sometimes leads to wrong or should i say misfit selection of reviewers who during review process could not grasp the overall idea and related implications of its interpretations thus leading to such publications.

@ M. Arshad Farhan

I beg your pardon.

You write about "rejection of a paper" (IF I understand well)

The real question is

"WHY wrong papers are published"?

Thanks