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Is there something like negative-citation-index? Where you spread refuted papers out through citations to other scientists and newspapers. It could be include
by ajuc 6y ago
Is there something like negative-citation-index?
Where you spread refuted papers out through citations to other scientists and newspapers.
It could be included as a factor when hiring scientists.
And of course the person who refuted a false paper should receive the citations of that false paper. It's only fair.
- lecarore 6y agoThis sounds like a good addition to the incentives system.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoThe number of papers which are refuted, in the sense that a serious error is identified that invalidates the main conclusions of the paper, are a vanishingly small percentage of papers published. This doesn't mean that a vanishingly small percentage of papers are wrong, only that it is very hard to identify errors because papers usually don't contain enough information to fully reconstruct the results. There are a lot of assumptions of good will in the system.
- ajuc 6y agoThen accept papers that refute these results by providing arbitrary data where it's missing.
- crankishness 6y agoExpanding on this, suppose there is an anti-journal, tentatively titled 'Journal of Bad Science', which features thoroughly refuted, bad-faith papers. Not just rejected papers, as the reasons can be as innocuous as a few spelling mistakes, but clearly and unambiguously bad research. This would form the basis of the Crank Index of a paper, which can be simplified into a stoplight system: Good research with good sources is GREEN. Getting featured in the Journal of BS earns a paper the esteemed distinction of a blaring scarlet RED, citing a RED paper will mark a paper ORANGE, citing ORANGE research leaves you YELLOW... Throwing together lots of ORANGE and YELLOW citations will nudge your paper up the spectrum towards RED. This would incentivize researchers to not only care about the quantity of the citations they share with each other, but to be extremely vigilant of the quality of those citations as well.
- fsflover 6y agoLet’s say I cited a “red” paper and explained how and why they were wrong. Does my paper become “orange”? I hope not, but that would require a lot of rigorous manual verification by the journal editors...
- ajuc 6y agoIdeally papers would start citing using a new format that makes explicit the dependencies between papers. For example: refutes: ... expands on: ... depends on: ... alternative approach to: ... etc.
- jpeloquin 6y agoIt would be great if journals published their articles as structured data. Then readers could compute a Crank Index, or do other automated citation analysis and filtering (e.g., flag excessive self-citations), using independently developed software. We shouldn't need to wait for journals to live up to their responsibility to innovate and improve their quality control. As for a list of unambiguously bad papers, we do have Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/. It's mainly a retraction tracker, but there is also associated community effort to proactively identify research misconduct.