Peer-reviewed scientific publishing works like this: A scientist or a science team have a scientific question, and they come together to design and conduct an experiment to try to answer that question. The experiment may take months, years, or even decades.

Once the scientists have collected and analyzed the experiment’s results, they write up their findings and draw conclusions based on the already accepted knowledge in the field, their new discovery, and their educated speculations of what is yet to be known.

Then, they send their article to scientific journals within their field of study.

When a journal editor receives the article, the editor reads it carefully and either rejects it or sends it to other known experts in the field, who weren’t involved with the study, to review the findings and the write-up. Once the experts weigh in, the editor then makes the decision about whether to reject or accept the paper, in most cases, with notes for the authors to revise their submission.

Peer reviewers will often ask the researchers insightful questions or query parts of the findings in the paper. These queries help the researchers refine their ideas, review their findings, and double-check that their data, and their analyses, are correct.

Good science is work that has a high level of integrity and transparency, is conducted in an unbiased way, and leads to findings that can be replicated by other scientists.

Bad science is often ego-driven or industry-sponsored: published not for the good of advancing knowledge or helping people, but to mislead the public, often for financial gain. For-profit industries have and continue to use bad science to convince consumers to buy their products.

Even more damaging may be the role of ideology—when certain positions become a matter of political position rather than scientific merit.

Three American researchers took advantage of this weakness to troll several journals by getting seven studies published in sociology journals.

One study, “Dog Parks Are Petri Dishes for Canine ‘Rape Culture,’” made it into the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

In the process, the researchers learned something disturbing:

Drug manufacturers copied and distributed the Smiths’ study to thousands of medical doctors to encourage them to prescribe DES.

The Harvard research was shoddy at best: They used a sample size of pregnant women that was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions and had no control group. The Smiths also failed to disclose that their research was funded by the drug industry.

Largely based on this junk science, an estimated 5 million to 10 million pregnant women in America took DES. Yet DES was neither helpful nor benign. It caused miscarriage, as well as an aggressive hormone-induced reproductive cancer in teens whose moms had taken it. DES was banned for use in pregnancy in 1971.

A more famous example started in the 1950s when the tobacco industry began a sophisticated public relations campaign to counteract the peer-reviewed science that showed that smoking was harmful to human health.

The Epoch Times spoke with a professor who spent more than 25 years in a top 10 medical school. This scientist asked not to be named, for fear of reprisal.

“I call it sneer review,” the scientist said. “There is tremendous bias. Reviewers ignore data that doesn’t fit with what they already believe.”

The scientist said that certain fields have fewer problems with special interests than others, and certain topics—including the safety of modern medicine and, especially, the safety of vaccines—tend to push ideological buttons.

“The idea in science should be that we just push toward finding out the answer. We have a hypothesis, we ask questions, we test the hypotheses, we collect more data,” the scientist said. “That’s how we move forward. But when it gets polarized, the sneer-review phenomenon starts to happen. Then it becomes a more ideological confrontation.

“They tend to be retracted after critique by anonymous critics,” he said. “This is a problematic new development. The journals are retracting based on criticism from anonymous reviewers, instead of publishing the critique and allowing the authors to rebut. That means the critics’ comments are not peer-reviewed.”

In September 2018, however, Gotzsche was voted off Cochrane’s board (six in favor, five opposed, and one abstention). This move led four board members to resign in protest. He was also fired from his position as director of the Nordic Cochrane Center and was suspended from the hospital where he worked.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” German physicist Max Planck famously writes in his 1950 autobiography, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

The discerning reader, whether scientist, academic, ethicist, journalist, or layperson, will understand that any asserted scientific “fact” or “conclusion” must be combined with common sense, a healthy skepticism, and a closer look at those who stand to profit.