Bem's Guide to write a journal article - (May/04/2014 )

Okay, I also thought that generally this was somehow "normal", even if it's not ideal of course.  As for the accidental findings, of course they shouldn't be standard...(I recall this other thread were someone actually said that he'd want to use some chemicals possibly gone bad (I don't remember what exactly) and it could promote an accidental finding which is of course completely nonsense...) But when your project is "find out the function of protein x in these particular cells", which my project actually was, it's necessary to start out broad and you have to poke around a bit at first, in the hope of narrowing it down....

There clearly is a great discrepancy between how it should be done and how it is done. BTW I think most of you will know this famous joke about research paper phrases and what they mean: http://sciencebasedlife.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/tumblr_lyfbuh86tv1qbh26i.jpg

Of course, what you state is true.

I was more speaking of small things (perhaps I phrased it in a bad way by stating "amazing discoveries").

A simplified example: imagine you study protein X and Y (are supposed to interact) but you fnd that protein X interacts with protein Z and not protein Y ...

hobglobin on Thu May 8 18:12:17 2014 said:

IMO this accidental findings can happen but you should not use it as a general working method (e.g. leaving my used petri dishes in a dirty hood and hopefully somewhen a new antibiotics producing fungus is growing...).

And especially in the beginning it might be sometimes a necessary and/or fruitful way to have a flawed hypothesis or a very broad one, but later you should understand the system enough to have better hypotheses that don't need to be adjusted to reality frequently...

And I think all branches of science have such problems but might be easier to find in natural sciences (using statistics to find data anomalies or just trying to repeat the experiment such as in the cancer works).

But not always (see e.g. here), and very complicated and specialised science such as quantum physics or mathematics seems sometimes similar prone to fraud problems as the social sciences (a classic is the Sokal affair) with its very special and difficult sounding scientific jargon :