[Neywiny]

Jumping in with the others, this is not good. When I've written papers in the past, and used peer reviewed, trusted journals, what else am I supposed to do? Recreate every experiment and analysis all the way down? Even if it's an entirely SW project, where maybe one could do that, presumably the code itself is maliciously wrong. You'd have to check way too much to make this productive.

[BalinKing]

> Recreate every experiment and analysis all the way down?

If an experiment or analysis is reliant on the correctness of a retracted paper, then shouldn't it need to be redone? In principle this seems reasonable to me—is there something I'm missing?

EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood... is your point that the criterion of "cites a retracted paper" is too vague on its own to warrant redoing all downstream experiments?

[Neywiny]

I think usually there's too much building off of each other for this. Standing on the shoulders of giants and whatnot. To me that's the purpose of society and human evolution but I won't get preachy. I didn't read the stem cell paper, but I'll use it for example. Let's say the stem cell paper says "stem cells are one type of cell from the human body" which cites some paper that first found stem cells. Maybe that paper cited the paper that first found any cells. And that one cited a paper about the molecular makeup of some part of the cell. And that cited a paper about what it means for an atom to be in a molecule. And that cited some paper about how atoms can contain electrons, and then that electrons are particles and waves.

I think, personally, it's unrealistic to expect every researcher who mentions anything that has an electron in it (aka most things) to need to recreate the double slit experiment. Or, to harvest the stem cells themselves instead of buying them from trusted suppliers. Yes I do as I type this out see more that if more re-experimenting was done it would help detect fraud. But crucially, it really doesn't matter what an electron is to people determining that stems cells are in humans. The "non-negotiably" is what worries me. There should be some negotiation to say "hey your paper uses this debunked article. You have x days to find another, proven paper that supports the argument, or remove the argument entirely, or we'll retract your paper as well." I think that's valid. Especially since the fraud here wouldn't be impacting the author using the bad paper (most of the time, I would imagine) but rather the ones writing the paper. I would hesitate to believe that people faking such crucial, potentially lifesaving research care that some nobody they'll never meet might be upset their paper doesn't make it.

I think really what I'd like to see instead is more checking done at the peer review stage. To me that's the whole point of the journal. I'm biased on this having been rejected during the peer review stage and disliking how expensive journal articles can get, but at the end of the day, that's the point of them. They should be doing everything in their power to ensure that the research is accurate. And if we can't trust that, what's the point to the journals at all? May as well just go on blogs or something.