alt Hacker NewsHave you seen the statistics about high impact journals having higher retraction/unverified rates on papers?
The root causes can be argued...but keep that in mind.
No single paper is proof. Bodies of work across many labs, independent verification, etc is the actual gold standard.
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The purpose of peer review is to check for methodological errors, not to replicate the experiment. With a few exceptions, it can't catch many categories of serious errors.
> higher retraction/unverified
Scientific consensus doesn't advance because a single new ground-breaking claim is made in a prestigious journal. It advances when enough other scientists have built on top of that work.
The current state of science is not 'bleeding edge stuff published in a journal last week'. That bleeding edge stuff might become part of scientific consensus in a month, or year or three, or five - when enough other people build on that work.
Anybody who actually does science understands this.
Unfortunately, people with poor media literacy who only read the headlines don't understand this, and assume that the whole process is all a crock.
This is something I think many people don't appreciate. A perfect example in practice is the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It's one of the leading and highest impact journals in psychology. A quick search for that name will show it as the source for endless 'news' articles from sites like the NYTimes [1]. And that journal has a 23% replication success rate [2] meaning there's about an 80% chance that anything you read in the journal, and consequently from the numerous sites that love to quote it, is wrong.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+Journal...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...