[EnigmaFlare]

I love the idea. It would also dampen the tendency to over-cite, and disincentivize citation rings. But mainly encourage researchers to actually evaluate the papers they're citing instead of just cherry picking whatever random crap they can find to support their idea.

Maybe negative citations could be categorized separately by the authors and not count towards the cited paper's citation count and be ignored for cascading citations.

If the citation doesn't materially affect the paper, the author can re-publish it with that removed.

[arp242]

> If the citation doesn't materially affect the paper, the author can re-publish it with that removed.

This paper is 22 years old. Some authors have retired. Some are dead.

I really think that at the very least it needs a quick sniff test. Which is boring uninteresting work and with 4,500 citations that will take some effort, but that's why we pay the journals big bucks. Otherwise it's just going to be the academic variant of the Scunthorpe problem.

And/or do something more fine-grained than a binary retraction, such as adding in a clear warning that a citation was retracted and telling readers to double-check that citation specifically.

[QuesnayJr]

If you are cherry-picking cites that agree with you, that is a much bigger scandal than you citing a paper that ended up being retracted 22 years later. The point of citations is to cite the relevant literature, pro and con.