[anjc]

> and whether or not it has been reproduced.

Nothing would ever get done if this was the bar for citation. Real advancements take place on the back of fraudulent results in widely cited papers. Actually, even within papers that have fraudulent results, advancements happen.

The motivation for such fraud is because work generally wont get published without positive results, even if the work was excellent. The fraud doesn't take the place of hard/great work. I'm not defending the practice.