Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Unlike auto manufacturing or food production, science is expected to produce trustworthy results without explicit standards of quality that are imposed from the top down. Quality control is supposed to be baked into the scientific process itself. Before it’s published, research is peer-reviewed to root out flaws; and even after that, a finding is not considered truly trustworthy until it is replicated by other experts in the field. In other words, there is no official seal of approval—quality assurance comes from the expert judgment of communities of scientists, who are supposed to be able to filter out the good from the bad on their own.
[For more of this story, written by Michael White, go to http://www.psmag.com/nature-an...tandards-for-science]
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