2 ms·

Citations are simply a flawed metric for anything useful. A prominent paper with a false hypothesis can get many citations because people reference it when the

• bachmeier 3y ago
  That's the example I often use. There are papers in prominent journals that draw negative citations. A related but much larger problem is that citations are a measure of the number of researchers working on a particular problem and nothing else. There was one topic in particular that had many researchers making small contributions, but all of those papers cited all the others, simply because they were written on that topic. Maybe the methods weren't the best or the conclusions weren't robust, but the only reason to cite a paper is because it is prior literature. It's not like you can refuse to cite papers because you believe they are of low quality.