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Are papers ever cited if the results are disproven? Would papers have cited the notorious Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism if they were writing about how

Are papers ever cited if the results are disproven? Would papers have cited the notorious Wakefield paper on vaccines and autism if they were writing about how their results do not match that paper? Does that count as a cite?

petschge 5y ago
Yes you cite the paper that you disagree with and yes by typical bibliometric measures that is counted as a citation.
bonoboTP 5y ago
Yes, citations aren't endorsements. Some citations (rarely) are negative/explicitly critical, but this kind of difference isn't tracked. A citation is a citation.
rossdavidh 5y ago
They do look at the quality of the citations; even after failing to replicate, most citations did not reference that failure to replicate.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  I think this is difficult to check convincingly. References are often ambiguous. A mention like “Although some have argued X[1]” could be skeptical, but not explicit, about Reference #1’s quality. I could mean that there’s convincing data on both sides, or I could mean that Ref #1 is hot garbage (but don’t want a fight). In some cases, there might be legitimately useful information in a retracted paper. If a paper describe an experiment, but then shows faked results, I’m not sure it’s wrong to cite it if you use a similar setup; that is where the idea came from, after all. Most critically, there’s an unpredictable and often long lag between reading a paper, citing it one’s own work, and that work being published. I’ve had things sit at a journal for a year before publication, and it never occurred to me to “re-verify” the citations I included; indeed, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
neffy 5y ago
Yes. That's the core problem. If you cite a paper to refute it, or to refer to its refutation, that just bumps its citation count. We haven't scaled the practice of science for the 21st century.

petschge 5y ago

Yes you cite the paper that you disagree with and yes by typical bibliometric measures that is counted as a citation.

bonoboTP 5y ago

Yes, citations aren't endorsements. Some citations (rarely) are negative/explicitly critical, but this kind of difference isn't tracked. A citation is a citation.

rossdavidh 5y ago

They do look at the quality of the citations; even after failing to replicate, most citations did not reference that failure to replicate.

mattkrause 5y ago
I think this is difficult to check convincingly. References are often ambiguous. A mention like “Although some have argued X[1]” could be skeptical, but not explicit, about Reference #1’s quality. I could mean that there’s convincing data on both sides, or I could mean that Ref #1 is hot garbage (but don’t want a fight). In some cases, there might be legitimately useful information in a retracted paper. If a paper describe an experiment, but then shows faked results, I’m not sure it’s wrong to cite it if you use a similar setup; that is where the idea came from, after all. Most critically, there’s an unpredictable and often long lag between reading a paper, citing it one’s own work, and that work being published. I’ve had things sit at a journal for a year before publication, and it never occurred to me to “re-verify” the citations I included; indeed, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.

neffy 5y ago

Yes. That's the core problem. If you cite a paper to refute it, or to refer to its refutation, that just bumps its citation count. We haven't scaled the practice of science for the 21st century.