I’ve always had an uneasy feeling about Retraction Watch and the ‘replication crisis’. Like the AI em-dashers they’re working on the wrong end of the problem, trying to clean things up by sorting out a few especially bad-looking products.
Reminds me of Porkbusters Coburn and Proxmire who ridiculed “silly” government projects, mostly agricultural because aristocrats are required to laugh at peasants. MANY OF THOSE “SILLY” PROJECTS WERE USEFUL AND CHEAP. The Porkbusters NEVER singled out a trillion-dollar military airplane that would be too expensive to use in combat. They NEVER mocked a trillion-dollar bailout for evil bankers.
The problem in academia is quantity, not quality. Tenure and grants require a HUGE number of intentionally meaningless papers, openly described as Least Publishable Units. LPUs are churned out to satisfy the tastes of the granting agencies and the pet theories of the advisers. There’s no room for thought in this desperate BETTING FRENZY.
Now the retractors are algorithmically applying modern standards to very old papers. A German journal has retracted two 1940s papers by Planck that weren’t even research. They were just philosophical musings on science. It appears that the algorithm noticed wide distribution and decided it was copyright infringement.
An algorithm that FUNCTIONS by infringing millions of CURRENT copyrights is automatically punishing well-known work by a famous scientist because it violated laws that didn’t exist in the 1940s.
Polistra's Mill 