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Unfortunately, by far the worst offenders in the social studies never retract.

by tsss 2y ago

jfengel 2y ago
The social studies are well known to have a replication problem, but you don't generally retract a paper just because it can't be replicated. Even if a conclusion turns out to be wrong you generally don't retract it. Retraction usually connotes some level of fraud or other serious and deliberate problem. It's a serious black mark on your record, which we don't do merely for being wrong. Science is all about hypothesis revision, and we expect to be continuously wrong. There should perhaps be a designation for "yeah, turns out we were wrong". Instead, you're expected to just find the contradicting papers in your literature search. Saying "I have a paper which proves X" isn't a complete argument unless you've done the full search of relevant papers. That doesn't fix the replication problem in the social sciences, where the subject (groups of people) are too hard to model and control. People do too often cite a single tiny study as if it meant something, and that's just not a valid way to use science. But retraction isn't the solution, not so long as the term connotes malfeasance. Like all sciences they need the room to be honestly wrong, because that's fundamental to science.
- tpoacher 2y ago
  I seriously challenge this mentality / interpretation of a retraction signalling fraud. This is absurd, and actively harmful. Quite the contrary, a retraction is often a signal of good scientific citizenship and due diligence, which may well come from due diligence of the authors themselves, not just external validators. NOT retracting a paper out of fear of being labelled a fraud and ostracised from the scientific community is a massive, unhealthy disincentive which we DEFINITELY do not need in the sciences. The article is VERY careful not to paint retracted papers with such ludicrous stigma; the focus is very appropriately on authors who add "inherited" citations without the necessary due diligence (i.e. actually attempting to read the paper in question, and finding out it has been retracted, for whatever reason)
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Maybe instead of just green marks and black marks, we need, uh, brown marks too. For producing b.s. that doesn't quite rise to the intentional fraud level, but, on balance, detracts from humanity's wisdom and knowledge. We may call it with some other term than retraction, in order to be clear about the difference, but without "brown marks", there is nothing to stop entshittification of science.

Unfortunately, by far the worst offenders in the social studies never retract.

by tsss 2y ago

Unfortunately, by far the worst offenders in the social studies never retract.

The social studies are well known to have a replication problem, but you don't generally retract a paper just because it can't be replicated. Even if a conclusion turns out to be wrong you generally don't retract it. Retraction usually connotes some level of fraud or other serious and deliberate problem. It's a serious black mark on your record, which we don't do merely for being wrong. Science is all about hypothesis revision, and we expect to be continuously wrong. There should perhaps be a designation for "yeah, turns out we were wrong". Instead, you're expected to just find the contradicting papers in your literature search. Saying "I have a paper which proves X" isn't a complete argument unless you've done the full search of relevant papers. That doesn't fix the replication problem in the social sciences, where the subject (groups of people) are too hard to model and control. People do too often cite a single tiny study as if it meant something, and that's just not a valid way to use science. But retraction isn't the solution, not so long as the term connotes malfeasance. Like all sciences they need the room to be honestly wrong, because that's fundamental to science.

tpoacher 2y ago
I seriously challenge this mentality / interpretation of a retraction signalling fraud. This is absurd, and actively harmful. Quite the contrary, a retraction is often a signal of good scientific citizenship and due diligence, which may well come from due diligence of the authors themselves, not just external validators. NOT retracting a paper out of fear of being labelled a fraud and ostracised from the scientific community is a massive, unhealthy disincentive which we DEFINITELY do not need in the sciences. The article is VERY careful not to paint retracted papers with such ludicrous stigma; the focus is very appropriately on authors who add "inherited" citations without the necessary due diligence (i.e. actually attempting to read the paper in question, and finding out it has been retracted, for whatever reason)
inglor_cz 2y ago
Maybe instead of just green marks and black marks, we need, uh, brown marks too. For producing b.s. that doesn't quite rise to the intentional fraud level, but, on balance, detracts from humanity's wisdom and knowledge. We may call it with some other term than retraction, in order to be clear about the difference, but without "brown marks", there is nothing to stop entshittification of science.