[oldandtired]

We have enough evidence of cooking the books in lots of different fields. Retraction Watch is a good site to see this.

The problem today is that there is no encouragement to investigate ideas that are different to the accepted models. Nor are this encouragement to do full scale duplications of reported results. Anomalies are only investigated if they don't appear to dispute the current consensus.

I had a recent discussion with a nuclear physicist that I admire about this and his response was to the effect that he would discourage such experiments. There was a lot more in the discussion which is not relevant here.

What we must be careful of is blindly assuming that our theories and models are correct. We have to realise that our interpretations of the results are many times based on deeply held beliefs that are not provable but are assumed to be true.