How Scientific Papers Get Retracted

The peer-review process, where editors and scientists vet the research and conclusions of scientific papers, is an important one. But even bastions of good science can be duped by an ethically impaired scientist. Studies suggest that the pressure to publish, especially in support of a hypothesis, can motivate even the most brilliant researchers to plagiarize, fudge data and play lose[sic] with their methods. And on the rare occasions that they do, it’s a quick trip to retraction and banishment from the science community.

In principle, cheating should be at a minimum. If you falsify data and the result is unimportant, there will be little effect but little notice paid. If the result is important, then other researchers will attempt to duplicate the result and/or build on them, and those experiments will fail. That will be important news, and eventually you will have to explain the anomaly.