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This latest result is "pretty damning," says University of Maryland, College Park, cognitive scientist Michael Dougherty, who was not involved with the research. "Citation counts have long been treated as a proxy for research quality," he says, so the finding that less reliable research is cited more points to a "fundamental problem" with how such work is evaluated.
[...] University of California, San Diego, economists Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy were interested in whether catchy research ideas would get more attention than mundane ones, even if they were less likely to be true. So they gathered data on 80 papers from three different projects that had tried to replicate important social science findings, with varying levels of success.
Citation counts on Google Scholar were significantly higher for the papers that failed to replicate, they report today in Science Advances, with an average boost of 16 extra citations per year. That's a big number, Serra-Garcia and Gneezy say—papers in high-impact journals in the same time period amassed a total of about 40 citations per year on average.
And when the researchers examined citations in papers published after the landmark replication projects, they found that the papers rarely acknowledged the failure to replicate, mentioning it only 12% of the time.
Well, nobody likes a Debbie Downer, do they?
Journal Reference:
Marta Serra-Garcia, Uri Gneezy. Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1705)
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday July 01 2021, @01:00PM (2 children)
To start with, citing does not imply approving. Controversial papers can accrue a lot of citations. Then comes the number of co-authors. If you have hundreds of co-authors each only self-citing occasionally, such papers rake in thousands of citations. Then comes the field, with short-lived research such as epidemiologcal/social science studies, analyzing the influence of a certain factor on some outcome being easily digestible and therefore citable. More fundamental STEM papers often take years to influence the community. By many metrics those are seen as unimportant which is why reputation of journals still matters a lot in these fields.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday July 01 2021, @02:15PM
Kind of funny, an economist tries to claim they are hard science and is outraged over that other soft sciences are quoted more often then something else. It has nothing to do with quality.
The reason they are quoted more often is that they make the news more often cause they are things that are relatable to normal (or non-academic) people. People can understand on some level social science research since it actually relates to them and their lives more often. While they don't understand math, physics, biology research as much cause it requires a lot more specialized education and are on a level that is just not very interesting to average Joe and Jane.
The failure to replicate is probably not even an interesting factor here, unless they are cited cause they are so bad so that is why they get cited. But that is not very likely.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 01 2021, @04:14PM
The 12% acknowledgement of demonstrated non-repeatability is... telling.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end