Correction thirteen years on

Scientists are rightly proud of the self-correcting and self-policing that the scientific community applies to itself. This is exemplified by the brouhaha surrounding a correction published last week by the authors (from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee) of a paper published thirteen years ago in Nature. The paper is widely acknowledged to represent a major contribution to the technique of very high resolution compositional analysis with a scanning electron microscope, and its claims are not in doubt, having been confirmed many times over since then.

The problem is that the authors claimed, and assured the referees, that some data had been analysed in a way which it turns out they had not, for reasons that are not now entirely clear. The authors have publicly eaten humble pie and apologised, but the paper has not been retracted and its conclusions still stand. The reason for this focus on truth and accuracy in a refereed paper, even where the errors do not affect the central claims of the paper, is that other workers often rely on reported methods and the community is as anxious to protect the integrity of subsequent work as it is to ensure that the central claims are properly supported by the evidence.

Is the process perfect? Of course not. Would Nature have forced this corrigendum if the paper was less prominent? I think probably not – errors in methods in a little cited paper in a less prestigious journal would be much less likely to be uncovered and much less likely to be publicly corrected. Nevertheless, this incident illustrates the ability and determination of the community to police itself and to ensure integrity.

Contrast the almost paranoid care demonstrated here with the appalling contempt for the truth demonstrated by creationists in their interminable repetition of false claims long after their errors have been pointed out to them.