In my world, there’s no holy book, no holy methodology. But there’s bullshit all around, and little nuggets of truth if your lucky, but at the end of the day, you just might find yourself covered in shit with nothing to show for it.
Scientific papers? They have a publish or perish situation going on. There is posturing, there is more of a need to show novelty than there is to confirm other people’s experiments. There’s no funding in confirmation, no career advancement.
They’re just kids in middle school trying to authentically flub their way through the book report on a book they didn’t read, because there’s a deadline, it’s late, and they better sound good. So they patch up inconsistencies as best they can and hope the teacher doesn’t catch them.
But somewhere in the middle of the posturing, jockeying for career advancement, seeking funding, kissing ass, covering mistakes in methodology by diverting to using this REALLY AWESOME piece of graph-making software… and covering up for the junior research analyst whose spreadsheet crashed and they had to fill in some bits of data using statistical gap-filling…
…there’s _SOME_ real science happening. That’s the stuff I look for.