Comment by light_hue_1
2 days ago
That's not what papers are for. But I can see how not being an academic would make you think that.
What you're describing are workshops with what we would call non-archival proceedings. Places where you write whatever you want and then talk about it.
Publications, conference or journal, are supposed to be what are called archival. They are a record of what we've discovered and want to share with the world. They are supposed to be sent into the world after we carefully complete a line of work.
Publications are not supposed to spam the system with half-baked junk. Sadly, that's what a lot of people are doing these days.
Some fields do have the opposite problem, though, where standards for publication are so high that they prevent publication of useful ideas or results that could be built on by other researchers. I don’t think a published paper should have to meet some kind of gold standard of completeness and correctness. It just has to report something new or interesting with any appropriate caveats attached.
I don't know I'm sure Monsanto put out[0] a lot of papers about how effective glyphosate is but another team decided to test glyphosate against the "inert" ingredients in roundup and found glyphosate was actually the weakest pesticide of the group.
Now, my pet theory is that they knew glyphosate wasn't that great, but talked it up in papers as a sacrificial anode sort of thing "gee shucks it looks like glyphosate based pesticides are harmful to humans (or bees, or fish, or) so we'll stop manufacturing that formulation."
But, Possibly due to academia, they have fanboys and cheerleaders and I think that's why it's still around and in heavy use even though we're not sure it's a good idea.
[0] Bayer Monsanto funds studies at agricultural universities.
P. S. Just watch.