Guides to reading science honestly
A paper being published does not mean it is right. These are the checks a reader can actually run, who screens science for problems, and where each safeguard stops. All free, all sourced, none of it assuming you are a scientist.
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All guides
10 pieces
Can you trust this study?
Start here if you have a specific paper or a headline in front of you.
- How to tell if a scientific study is trustworthy The checks you can run yourself in a few minutes, and the ones that need an expert. What a journal name does and does not tell you.
- How to check if a paper was retracted The free ways to find out, step by step, plus why a paper can be wrong for years before anyone withdraws it.
- What a retraction is, and what it means for you What happens when a journal pulls a paper, who decides, and why a retraction is not always an accusation of fraud.
How often science goes wrong
The scale of it, with the sources shown.
- How many papers get retracted? The sourced numbers The real figures and the trend behind them, and what those numbers honestly do and do not prove about science.
- Why retracted papers are still cited A withdrawn paper keeps being cited for years, and the AI research tools people now trust repeat it without a word of warning. What the studies actually found, and how to avoid citing one yourself.
Who checks science, and where they stop
The safeguards that exist, named, including their limits.
- Who checks research integrity? The tools, named Papermill Alarm, the STM Integrity Hub, Proofig, PubPeer and the Retraction Watch dataset: who screens what, and the gap none of them covers.
- How Lucent checks every paper before you read it Our own method written out in full, including, plainly, what it cannot tell you.
Where to read new science
Honest comparisons, including where we are not the right answer.
- The best plain-language science newsletters What is out there and who each one is actually for, written without pretending we win every comparison.
- Lucent vs Retraction Watch: what each one does Where the two overlap, where they do not, and which one you actually want for your question.
- Lucent vs Nature Briefing: what is different Two different jobs, compared without spin.