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Expanding on this, suppose there is an anti-journal, tentatively titled 'Journal of Bad Science', which features thoroughly refuted, bad-faith papers. Not just

Expanding 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 ago
Let’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 ago
  Ideally 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 ago
It 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.

fsflover 6y ago

Let’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 ago
Ideally 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 ago

It 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.