4 ms·

I understand what you describe, and it's possible consequences. But I would put forward two arguments; 1. Those who want to believe in bullshit conspiracies wi

I understand what you describe, and it's possible consequences. But I would put forward two arguments; 1. Those who want to believe in bullshit conspiracies will do it regardless of the amount of citations in a research article terribly summarised by a clickbait web page of which they only read the headline. Any who can read more than 10words have been using and abusing google scholar for years to support their nonsense, the ability to find a reference does not equate to the ability to critically appraise the contents. 2. Science is a small world. In each specific field you get to know the big names and institutes, and those are used as a better gauge of the quality of a paper. The peer-review, for all it's pitfalls including its dependence on volunteers, does a good job at stemming a lot of bullshit. I'd proffer it's not the articles but rather the multiple for-profit publishing houses setting up multiple journals through which they funnel pay-to-publish articles that are contributing to the dilution of trust in published science. Again on that note, scientists in each field know which journals to trust and which to double check.

mike_hearn 3y ago
> scientists in each field know which journals to trust and which to double check I've not seen much evidence of this in my own reading. Maybe in some fields, but certainly not all. During the COVID years I read a lot of epidemiological and public health papers. They all had dozens of references and would be published in well known journals like Nature, BMJ, the Lancet etc. Yet when checked many of the referenced papers would simply not validate. For example, they existed but wouldn't actually support the claim being made. Sometimes they wouldn't even be related, or would actually contradict the claim. Sometimes the claim would appear in the abstract, but the body of the paper would admit it wasn't actually true. That was only one of the many kinds of problems peer reviewed published papers would routinely have. It became painfully apparent that nobody is actually reading papers in the health world adversarially, despite what we're told about peer review. The "a statement having a citation = it's true" assumption is very much held by many [academic] scientists. It's a subcomponent of the very strong belief in academia that everyone within it is totally honest all the time. This is how you end up with the Lancet publishing the Surgisphere papers (a paper using an apparently fictional dataset), without anyone within the field noticing anything is wrong. Instead it got noticed by a journalist. It needs some sort of systematic fix because otherwise more and more people will just react to scientific claims by ignoring them.

mike_hearn 3y ago

> scientists in each field know which journals to trust and which to double check I've not seen much evidence of this in my own reading. Maybe in some fields, but certainly not all. During the COVID years I read a lot of epidemiological and public health papers. They all had dozens of references and would be published in well known journals like Nature, BMJ, the Lancet etc. Yet when checked many of the referenced papers would simply not validate. For example, they existed but wouldn't actually support the claim being made. Sometimes they wouldn't even be related, or would actually contradict the claim. Sometimes the claim would appear in the abstract, but the body of the paper would admit it wasn't actually true. That was only one of the many kinds of problems peer reviewed published papers would routinely have. It became painfully apparent that nobody is actually reading papers in the health world adversarially, despite what we're told about peer review. The "a statement having a citation = it's true" assumption is very much held by many [academic] scientists. It's a subcomponent of the very strong belief in academia that everyone within it is totally honest all the time. This is how you end up with the Lancet publishing the Surgisphere papers (a paper using an apparently fictional dataset), without anyone within the field noticing anything is wrong. Instead it got noticed by a journalist. It needs some sort of systematic fix because otherwise more and more people will just react to scientific claims by ignoring them.