Great article, and so true unfortunately. It's a bit of a catch-22 however, since requiring more sole-author papers leads to more stealing of ideas, but increased recognition on papers is part of the scientific inflation problem.
It's an unfortunate fact that there is no investment in re-checking scientific papers. I think part of the solution would involve be an international committee whose sole function is to check scientific publications for accuracy and reproducibility. Additionally, people should be more concerned about the impact factor associated with a scientist and their published articles, rather than the volume of work produced.
Sometimes however, I feel a different approach to the same problem deserves a separate publication. In my experience, I've often needed to read many different views of the same problem in scientific publications in order to be inspired with a solution to my own experimental issues.
This was a good read and I hope the scientific community moves towards solving these issues very soon.
As long as there are no serious consequences for non reproducible results, there is little incentive to keep this racket from spiraling out of control
That's absolutely true. However, I think there are genuine cases of mistakes or results that are very difficult to reproduce due to our limited understanding of certain biological mechanisms, and I feel it would be unfair to punish these people as they would essentially be being accused of making up results?
The field of biology is very complex and it is understood that sometimes some experiments are difficult to replicate. I believe this happens when the researcher still does not understand the mechanisms he is replicating. What is dangerous is when it comes to research in the area of cancer or other diseases and I understand that in the area of health this phenomenon is common.