Has anyone heard about the book "The egg-laying dog" from Beck-Bornholdt? I don't know about an English translation, I freely translated the title from German. It is a book about fallacies in statistics, research, especially in medicine, written in a style to be comprehensible by the layman.

It discusses at great length the problems plaguing modern research (well, the research of the 1990's when the book was written, but I doubt that very much has changed). For example, the required statistical significance for a publication is much more relaxed than it was a long time ago. Often a p-value of 5% is enough for a publication, so even with perfectly unbiased researchers, without p-fishing or other unethical tricks, there is a huge number of accepted publications around which are utterly rubbish. This is all made much worse by the fact that everyone wants new results, so few researchers can get funding by repeating and verifying already published results (unless the publication in question is on every headline), and also few researchers are inclined (or supported by the system) to publish negative results.