Comment by kukkeliskuu
5 hours ago
It can be turned around as well, for validating existing research, creating a bot that checks papers against all the well-known logical fallacies, issues with statistical methods, checks the images etc.
5 hours ago
It can be turned around as well, for validating existing research, creating a bot that checks papers against all the well-known logical fallacies, issues with statistical methods, checks the images etc.
I hate to say this, but a researcher in biology ain't a statistician or logician. Many math paper hand waves over many parts of a proof.. yet both of those can be and have been useful in practice.
That may well be the case. My suspicion is that many research papers would not pass such a quality review. I am not saying anything about their usefulness, though.
You are not suggesting it, but as some might, I want to emphasize that I think it is, really, really, really bad idea to argue for limiting exposure of the bad practices because the papers may be useful even when not following good practices.
The science can work only when we can trust that the foundation it has been built on, including previous research, is solid.
The trust is partly based on the fact that science is self-correcting. As we know from charge of electron measurements, the existing narrative can work against the self-correction, even when everybody is trying to be as truthful as possible.
My impression is that to a large extend, on many fields, publication numbers (and money) have become so important that self-correction process may have become broken.