[anshulbasia27]

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

[gus_massa]

This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth.

Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.

In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.

Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.

In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.

Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.

From the article:

>> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.

[graemep]

There is a big difference between something that just turns out to be wrong, and something that is dishonestly or negligently wrong.

For example, AFAIK, Wakefield's paper claiming MMR causes autism was eventually retracted by the editors of The Lancet.

[chermi]

"Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know."

What does that have to do with this situation? I'm honestly trying to figure out your chain of thought. Do you think the future should have an impact on the present somehow? The fraud in the op post happened at the time of publication. Oh and btw. No fraud in the two you cited. Unless you figured out how to apply future to present. In which case they probably would've published much better papers, somehow.

[gus_massa]

What about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Mendelian_parado... Apparently the numbers of the second generation are too good to be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's... Apparently the viscosity was wrong, and then everyone else made corrections to get a similar result.

> What does that have to do with this situation?

The problem is how to document error without overwhelming honest authors. Imagine a nightmare with a DMCA like process, where anyone can can fill a retraction request and the authors have a week to reply. [The data is in an obscure folder in a notebook that is dead since 5 years. Most of the processing was done by a guy that is now working in the industry for x10 salary.] [Assuming you didn't work with mice, and you must resurrect them to fill the additional data asked in the retraction request.]

An alternative is let the editors ask a new reviewer to make the decision, but everyone has horror stories of reviewers that made bad reviews in spite the manuscript was correct. Then what? Ask the authors again to defend the paper?

The current method is that anybody can publish a "comment" if they find a journal that agree to publish it.

[jmalicki]

Regardless, published papers aren't an authoritative source of truth. Just a note to your friends "hey I did some cool stuff I want to tell you about!"

Sure it's slightly more reviewed than a GitHub repo, but it's not an end all be all.

[jltsiren]

The policy is what you would expect from a journal that is effectively run by volunteers. While the publisher has paid employees, the editorial board in charge of the journal itself seems to consist of volunteers.

When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative.

From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.

[pas]

They could at least send the paper with the reported problems out to a new set of referees.

And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).

[chithanh]

> Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide.

Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).

Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...

[toraway]

Semmelweis died approximately 100 years before the thalidomide scandal so not sure what that is supposed to prove…

(other than being a favorite go-to of numerous quacks and charlatans who insist that modern medicine is similarly persecuting them).

[chithanh]

It proves that the medical community did not learn from Semmelweis.

Reports on Thalidomide side effects were ignored, suppressed or dismissed. Distributors sat on such reports for months while continuing to sell the drug. Overall it took several years from the first observed birth defects until the drug was banned in most countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/25/distillers-k...

Numerous other examples before and after that (including deliberate ignorance of fatigue and medical errors resulting from it) show how medicine elevates institutional interests and groupthink over people's lives.