Comment by rcxdude

> It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.

Peer review is a very basic check, more or less asking someone else in the field "Does this paper, as presented, make any sense?". It's often overvalued by people outside the field, but it's table stakes to the scientific conversation, not a seal of approval by the field as a whole.

>Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.

I think it's rare that scientists take things completely at face value. Even without fraud, it's easy for people to make mistakes and it's rare that everyone in a field actually agrees on all the details, so if someone is relying on a paper for something, they will generally examine things quite closely, talk to the original authors, and to whatever extent practical attempt to verify it themselves. The publishing process doesn't tend to reward this behavior, though, unfortunately (And also as a result, an external observer does not generally see the results of this: if someone concludes that a result is BS as a result of this process, they're much more likely to drop it than try to publish a rebuttal, unless it's something that is particularly important)