It's Friday, May 1st, 2015, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indra Viscontas.

And I'm Kishore Hari. Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where

science, politics, and society collide. We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it all matters. You can find us online at motherjones.com slash at inquiringshow.tumbler.com or on Twitter at inquiring show and Facebook at

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Pretty much every week we talk about a new study or finding here on Inquiring Minds,

and we do that partially because we have a lot of confidence in the system that produces those studies,

that there's peer review in place and that those studies have been reviewed by various scientists,

editors, and journalists to a certain extent. But every now and again, bad science gets through and gets published.

And that poses an interesting dilemma for science. Once the error is found, which is non-trivial

to find some of these errors, whether it's intentional or simply

just an honest mistake, that's when the retraction process kicks in. But that process in science

was largely invisible until recent times. For a long time, you just get a short notice from

the journal saying such and such paper has been retracted by the authors, or papers would just disappear altogether with no

statement whatsoever. So I called up Ivan Oransky, who founded a blog called Retraction Watch,

because he was suspicious of this and thought, it really wasn't benefiting science in any way.

Ivan is the editorial director of MedPage and teaches medical journalism at NYU.

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