THE PREVALENCE OF JUNK SCIENCE SEEMS TO HAVE ONLY GOTTEN WORSE SINCE THIS SERIES BEGAN.

implant scare, the poisonous venetian blind menace, the declining sperm count alarm, the bad weather warnings, the wireless phone risk. These are all the products of junk science.”

Our standard definition over the years has been this: Junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated and the science adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda. If anything, the state of science seems to have deteriorated over the last two decades. The world remains awash in major and minor distortions in information, reports and policies that are grounded in junk science.

Recent assessments by scientists themselves suggest the problem is much greater than the daily manipulations of NGO leaders, agenda scientists, gullible media and powerseeking politicians. The very foundations of the modern research process appear to be crumbling. In our opening commentary today, writer Donna Laframboise outlines the ongoing crisis in peer review, the system used by scientific journals to screen and approve new research. “In a world in which published research is as likely to be wrong as it is to be right, beware the claim that the latest government policy is evidence-based. Unless the research in question has been painstakingly reproduced, we have no way of knowing if it’s reliable or risible.”

A couple of weeks ago The Guardian published a stinging attack on the science-publishing industry by Julian Kirchherr, a doctoral scholar at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. The headline, “Why we can’t trust academic journals to tell the scientific truth,” underlined the case that scientific research is a shambles marred by untested, unproven and unsupported conclusions.

Kirchherr adds that “the main reason for the spread of fake news in scientific journals is the tremendous pressure in the academic system to publish in high-impact journals.” He brings personal experience to the story. He tells of a journal that rejected his submission of a paper concluding that a “highly cited study” could not be replicated. Not only does the publication rejection interfere with his own career, Kirchherr says it reflects the sorry state of today’s published science.

He cites studies. “More than 70 per cent of researchers who took part in a recent study published in Nature have tried and failed to replicate another scientist’s experiment. Another study found that at least 50 per cent of life science research cannot be replicated. The same holds for 51 per cent of economic papers.”

Unfortunately, NGOs, the media and politicians thrive on published research which may or may not be anything more than junk science. Adding to the crisis is the fact that much science research is conducted to provide evidence for government action. Government claims to be pursuing evidencebased policy making was mocked years ago as “policy-based evidence making.”

A stronger bit of ridicule was coined decades ago by the great American journalist and satirist, H.L. Mencken. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

From calorie counting to climate change, from peer review to pollution scares and economic policy-making, these are today’s hobgoblins, brought to you via junk science. Time to march.