3 ms·

papers that cited need to be re-examined at best. we certainly shouldn't rule out the event of recursive retraction of papers if they all were vitally dependent

• mattkrause 9y ago
  This seems incredibly unlikely. I just had a paper accepted (yay!). Although we cited sixty-odd papers, I don't think our conclusions critically depends on any one of them. A lot of the citations place the current work in context. If these papers turned out to be false, it might make the paper less "interesting"--the mechanism underlying a useless therapy is pretty boring, after all--but the factual content would be unchanged. Other citations compare our results with others' work. These discussions are silly if the other work turns out to be flawed, but again, the facts in our paper would not change. We had a lot of techniques-related citations. Many of these, however, are mostly about giving credit or pointing to extra information: we used a behavioral paradigm adapted from this paper, evaluation was done using the criteria established by that paper, etc. A few citations are used to "prove" something is (ir)relevant for the current experiments. An error in one of these papers could be damaging. However, we usually try to have multiple sources for these claims, so any one error would not be calamitous. People usually try to show that their own data matches the cited work, so we have several analyses like that. Finally, it's worth noting that an individual paper (including mine) does not provide iron-clad or no evidence for something. Instead, it should nudge your beliefs slightly one way or another.