Scientific knowledge and its errors: An integrated review and roadmap

With the explosion of scientific data and paper preprints, scientists and media find it hard to navigate and quality control interpretations made, among many possible errors in data, analysis, and presentation. This paper reviews the many errors involved in generating knowledge from scientific data. Notably, the review integrates both data biases and calculation errors, commonly discussed within the natural and medical sciences, and fallacies and semantic errors, commonly discussed in the humanities and social sciences. The overview of possible errors involved in generating knowledge, from data collection and curation, via calculation and analysis, to interpretation and presentation, defines a “roadmap” that may ideally help to better identify errors, train academic conduct in relation to reviewing science, and aid scientific literacy of citizens engaged in public science discussions