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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: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday July 01 2021, @02:10PM (1 child)
That is the best case scenario. A sad and quite likely other outcome is that my research assistant did a search for some papers that could back up what we are doing and your paper was inline with that or related to it somehow on a keyword level or something similar so we are including you to get out citation number up since if we cite you we are then more likely to be cited ourselves when the next person looks to cite someone and finds you and then also us so it's a gigantic citation-circlejerk.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 01 2021, @04:12PM
I remember working with "lab partners" in social sciences in Junior College - and this is the best possible behavior I could imagine coming out of any of them. Whatever the minimum possible effort to meet the requirements, and often less, is what I saw the majority of them doing - even the ones who were pursuing it as their major and potential career.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end