Right, the decisions made by future researchers about what to base their work on are the real evaluation, hence citation counts as a core metric. It's easy to c

Right, the decisions made by future researchers about what to base their work on are the real evaluation, hence citation counts as a core metric. It's easy to claim positive results by making your null hypothesis dogshit (and choice of "p" is easily the least inspired way to sabotage a null hypothesis), but researchers learn this game early and tend to not gamble their time following papers where they suspect this is what's going on. The whole thing kinda works, in a world where the alternatives don't work at all.