The resistance to the correction of error in scholarly publications is merely a symptom of a much larger systemic cancer corrupting professional and governmental institutions—indeed, all of institutional science. Research is driven not by a desire to determine objectively whether a hypothesis is valid, but rather by the will to make hypotheses appear true.¹ The scale of the problem is such that any meaningful correction is impossible and retraction would wipeout well over half of the published scientific literature of the past half-century:

• While at Tufts University School of Medicine, John Ioannidis provided a statistical analysis demonstrating “Why most published research findings are false”.²
• In early April, 2015, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, attended a closed meeting in London that addressed “one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations. The case against science is straight-forward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”³
• Henry Bauer, emeritus professor of chemistry and science studies at Virginia Tech, has analyzed why supposedly authoritative information about the most salient science-related matters has become dangerously misleading or false. “Large institutional bureaucracies now dominate the public face of science. … exist knowledge monopolies composed of international and national bureaucracies. Since those same organizations play a large role in the funding of research as well as in the promulgation of findings, these monopolies are at the same time research cartels”⁴

Nowadays, governments, big business, and large institutions collude to impose dogma to protect the status quo, taking us from from Democratic to “Zombie” Science:

Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down. It keeps twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with your eyes half-closed)
zombie science looks much like the real thing. But in fact the zombie has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant pumping of funds. If
zombie science is not scientifically-useable—what is its function? In a nutshell, zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda to be deployed in
arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion. Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science; and it is precisely the superficial face-plausibility which is the sole and sufficient purpose of zombie science.⁵

1. [Lushington GH, Chaguturu R. A systemic malady: the pervasive problem of misconduct in the biomedical sciences. Part I. Issues and causes. Drug Discovery World. 2015;16(spring):79-90] ↩︎
2. [Ioannidis JPA. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med. 2005;2(8):e124] ↩︎
3. [Horton R. Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet. 2015;385(9976):1380] ↩︎
4. [Bauer HH. Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels. Journal of Scientific Exploration. 2004;18(4):643-60]. ↩︎
5. [Charlton BG. Zombie science: a sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest. Med Hypotheses. 2008;71(3):327-9 ↩︎