it's the end of the world as I know it

According to an article in the "New Scientist", half the scientific papers that get published are wrong. I think that perhaps the conclusions could be misleading, but unless there's clearly forged data, I have a hard time believing that half published works are wrong.

I recently read a paper that was focused on nicotinic receptors on lymphocytes. The strongest thing I remember is something in the discussion that went something like this "there is conflicting results in regards to expression of nicotinic receptors" and to back up that assertion was a reference to my paper, and a paper by a different group.

I think the biggest reason for the inaccuracies is related to what I call "reference hell", having to provide every obvious point you wish to make in your paper. There are hundreds of papers that show that there are physiological differences between mouse species, let alone mouse, human, and other species. I admit that I have in my attempts to find references only read the abstract, and not the details of their experiments. So, someone that publishes based on one species of mouse cannot be used by a different researcher that used a different species of mouse.

Our department suffered a small scandal when the highest producing professor was accused of faking her data in papers and grants. After a long protracted struggle, ties were cut, and we tried to move on. So I must admit that the possiblity of fake data is possible, but I don't think it's half the published results. I think it's more misunderstandings that lead to the can discredit a paper.