NO WORRIES; IT WAS NEVER WHOLE:

Academics are judged on how many papers they can publish in high-impact journals -- so much so that their career path is sometimes called "publish or perish." And journals, usually, only publish exciting, novel, positive results.

One way of "finding" positive results is to make up your data -- outright fraud: More than 8,000 biomedical research papers have been retracted for suspected fraud since 2003. Others plagiarize data and text from older studies.

You can even just torture it, and it'll tell you anything you want to hear. In 2011, three researchers published a paper which found -- to the level of "statistical significance" which most journals demand -- that listening to When I'm Sixty-Four by The Beatles made people younger. Not metaphorically younger. Literally younger. Which is, of course, impossible.

They did this as a stunt, to demonstrate that using perfectly normal statistical practice -- in particular, measuring lots of different things and seeing if there were any interesting correlations, a practice called "p-hacking" -- you could find almost anything you liked.

Taken together, journals' demand for novelty and the ubiquity of p-hacking made it essentially inevitable that the results of most published scientific papers in many disciplines would be false.

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