Comment by mike_hearn

Sorry, what I meant was that the authors on a paper are supposed to be reviewing each other's contributions. They should all have access to the same data and understand what's going on. In practice, that doesn't always happen of course. But it should. Peer review where a journal just asks someone to read the final result is indeed a much weaker form of check.

There's way too many cases of bogus papers being cited hundreds or thousands of times for me to believe scientists check papers they are building on. It probably depends on a lot on the field, though, this stuff always does.