Every form of evidence has its flaws …
Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
[There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away.
In my first publishable research, I obtained evidence that the replication of polio viral RNA engendered a multi-stranded intermediate, although my description of that intermediate proved flawed in its details.
Enough research will tend to support your conclusions.
In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts
Published papers may omit important steps and the memory of men of science, even the greatest, is sadly fallible.
That is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy with his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all-that all his accumulation proves an entirely different thing.
