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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @06:42PM
I used to believe that, but I'm no longer sure. The Trump presidency stands as empirical evidence of that. There are literally too many instances to count, but the big one which got me was how quickly "Lock Her Up" disappeared when Trump said a word about not wanting to pursue that anymore. And remember how much of the Republican Party was "Never Trump"ers, but how quickly that changed?
As another example, consider the Democrat's (and the "left") opinion of Russia. It want from "why can't we all get along, this isn't the cold war anymore" to "you don't understand, they are a major threat to our democracy." Likewise, the Republican's (and the "right") quickly went to "you can never trust a Russian" to "ehh, Putin isn't such a bad guy."
My current theory is that people establish their affiliation with something (be it an idea, a group, or what have you), and then that defines them. If that group changes, then most people go along with that change. If The Party announced "the cacao ration has been raised from 10 grams to 8 grams," sure, some would question it... but I think a lot more would cheer the party for doing such a great job.
(Which is why it is all the more important for Benjamins of the world to not just be cynical asses and to actually do something to help the situation... to mix fictional metaphores.)