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coffeesharkpie t1_j5gva2d wrote

Reply to comment by Terminarch in How Covid-19 vaccines succeeded in saving a million US lives, in charts by ILikeNeurons

Welp, if you reviewed the paper, you at least had your chance of critizing the approach. Did you strongly suggest a rejection to the editor? Also, there is a notion that bad or devise papers have a higher chance of being cited. That's one reason why the number of citations is a pretty bad metric to judge the quality of research.

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Terminarch t1_j5gyedj wrote

>Did you strongly suggest a rejection to the editor?

On what authority, an appeal to honesty? That failed when they wrote the formula.

Seriously, I don't think it was a mistake. Read their conclusion and you'll get the picture. It's one thing to do a rough estimate, but pay attention to their language and tone there. This is meant to push an agenda. I believe it was intentional fraud.

>there is a notion that bad or devise papers have a higher chance of being cited

Source? That would be interesting to look into.

>number of citations is a pretty bad metric to judge the quality of research

Yeah. That wasn't my point. It's not about quality of the paper, it's about quality of the scientific field to uncritically build upon this (and similar) as a compromised foundation.

It is however possible that you're right, that many times it was cited in refutation. I never actually checked.

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coffeesharkpie t1_j5hc4al wrote

You stated you reviewed the paper. In the review process you should be able to point out methodological flaws to the editor leading to a rejection or a major revision.

Like I said it's a notion not hard science. For a practical example just take a look at the debunked Wakefield (1998) paper incorrectly linking vaccines to authism. 4000+ citations according to Google Scholar. Other examples are papers on water that has a memory, magical stem cells, arsenic DNA, or non-Mendelian genetics. It's actually quite easy to find examples of papers with very high numbers of citations that should have been printed in a tabloid instead of a scientific journal.

Many scientists are really no better than high school gossipers.

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