Key Points
Its clear that errors are everywhere, and a small portion of these errors will change the conclusions of papers, says Malte Elson, a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland who studies, among other things, research methods..
In Elsons project, researchers are paid to trawl papers for possible errors and awarded bonuses for every verified mistake they discover...
The idea came from a discussion between Elson and Arslan, who encourages scientists to find errors in his own work by offering to buy them a beer if they identify a typo (capped at three per paper) and 400 ($430) for an error that changes the papers main conclusion..
Error-checking isnt a standard part of publishing scientific papers, says Hussey, a meta-science researcher at Elsons lab in Bern..
The ERROR project pairs authors of influential scientific papers with reviewers who go through their work looking for errors..
