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by em-bee
1932 days ago
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this sounds like a good approach. right now every citation is an endoresement, and the choice is to support a publication or to ignore it. there should be a way to make a negative citation, that allows you to declare that the referenced publication is contradicting. as a result there would be two citation counts for each publication. like upvotes and downvotes. i believe contradicting citations do happen now, but the fact that they are contradicting can't be seen from the citation count. |
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This is a valid point, but it's important to note that it only applies when using aggregate citation counts as a rough proxy for importance within a field. That's useful for prioritizing what to read but not for assessing the validity of any given result (of which there are often quite a few, at least in the life sciences).
Within a given paper, it's not at all uncommon for the authors to explicitly call out some detail from another study as being incorrect in their view. That doesn't mean that they necessarily agree or disagree with the rest of the cited work though.
What I'm getting at here is that negative citations would likely be far too coarse to be useful in practice. It's relatively rare that a paper outright disagrees with an entire work.