4 ms·

Not many things are automatic in research paper publishing… It all good old PDFs in which even the publication date doesn't always appear. You have to look up t

by jraph 3y ago

Not many things are automatic in research paper publishing… It all good old PDFs in which even the publication date doesn't always appear. You have to look up the title and find out in which journal / conference it's been published, and you get the date. Anyway, it would not be fair to automatically invalidate papers citing retracted ones. Including: - reproduction attempts - some minor citation in related works - it's usually not obvious that a paper is manipulated or even wrong without any bad faith involved Now, I wish we could update papers with disclaimers and notes, but again, we are dealing with good old PDFs that are never going to be updated… Good luck even noticing that a paper was retracted. I wish we had better formats and publication processes.

jacquesm 3y ago
You could deal with that in a reader or in a service where you upload a draft of your paper which then spits out a list of potentially problematic citations, even if those are more than one step removed from your first citation.
- jraph 3y ago
  Sounds like a useful tool!
velosol 3y ago
I'd just like to expand a bit on the minor citation: you often cite the seminal papers in a field simply to give context to the work you're doing and, in some fields, to show competing or past equations as contrast to your method of doing something. None of those require the paper you're citing to be free from fraud: seminal works with fraudulent or inaccurate results may still have preparation methods that are applicable to novel, non-fraudulent, experimental techniques and equations are rarely at issue with data manipulation or other fraud. There's still space to be aware of retracted papers in citations as building directly on those results and managing to show an improvement on doctored data would be suspicious but I'm pretty sure that is the minority of citations in many fields.

by jraph 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

You could deal with that in a reader or in a service where you upload a draft of your paper which then spits out a list of potentially problematic citations, even if those are more than one step removed from your first citation.

jraph 3y ago
Sounds like a useful tool!

velosol 3y ago

I'd just like to expand a bit on the minor citation: you often cite the seminal papers in a field simply to give context to the work you're doing and, in some fields, to show competing or past equations as contrast to your method of doing something. None of those require the paper you're citing to be free from fraud: seminal works with fraudulent or inaccurate results may still have preparation methods that are applicable to novel, non-fraudulent, experimental techniques and equations are rarely at issue with data manipulation or other fraud. There's still space to be aware of retracted papers in citations as building directly on those results and managing to show an improvement on doctored data would be suspicious but I'm pretty sure that is the minority of citations in many fields.