[Retric]

Individually papers are generally not trusted which is why literature reviews are a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature_review

The issue is not on the science side, but how results are communicated to the general public. Administrators tend to add as much hype as possible, and reporters strip out all the important details.

[i000]

Is this assessment (reviews over papers) based on your own experience?

As a scientist I would say quite the opposity is the case, reviews are sloppy in citations, per editorial guidelines have to be written in a positive optimistic tone, and often overstate the claims of the cited articles.

[Retric]

I am not suggesting they are more or even nessisarily as accurate vs individual papers. Rather, they demonstrate the untrusted nature of individual papers.

Personally, I often find them a useful starting point on a topic. At best they capture the field at a moment in time, at worst their near useless. However, that’s just me not everyone in every field.

[ramraj07]

I've gone through the phase of distrusting individual papers and relying on reviews.

Only to again realize that reviews are also often vehicles of bias perpetuated by the authors where they subtly amp up papers by themselves and their "clique" of researchers.

Only solution really is to just read as much as possible, be as critical as possible and never trust authors to interpret their results with full honesty.

[bayesian_horse]

Every fraudulent paper adds to the scientific noise rather than to the scientific information.

Not only are they wasting their own funding, they are also wasting other people's time and money who often can't afford to ignore prior work. At the very least such papers come up in peer review.

And apparently, fraudulent papers can get cited quite a lot in practice!