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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: 2) by Socrastotle on Wednesday July 21 2021, @03:00PM
I also get the exact same impression:
That quote [uchicago.edu] was from Thomas Jefferson, 1807. And there were countless other similar sentiments from various founding fathers and other great thinkers of the times. I used to believe these sentiments were part rhetorical, part metaphor. But now we're entering into an era where what he said, even taken completely at face value, is not even especially hyperbolic.
So in many ways I think our current era, as crazy as seems things is not really new. Rather we "all" (being the majority of humans born in the last 50-60 years in the developed world), basically just grew in a sort of mini-utopia that was little more than a bubble in time. And so as that bubble pops it kind of feels like we're heading towards some unprecedented insanity. But no, it's quite precedented. What isn't precedented is how nice we had things for some time.
This also even applies if you go much further back. Reading the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Aurelius, and so on - it feels very much as if they are describing the world we now live in. "The Republic" in particular is practically a transcription of the happenings of the day.