[001sky]

If she has not been doing something interesting, that line of research does not get cited, dies out, and does not get funding.

Could you explain how this verifies results? Citation (alone) isn't verification. And its safe to say followers and funding correlate with one another, at least statistically.

[bloaf]

Say someone publishes a paper that has the conclusion: If you preform procedure X, you get carbon nanotubes with property Y.

Lets then go on to say that someone publishes a paper which states: carbon nanotubes with property Y will theoretically allow us to do Z.

If Z is something interesting and worthwhile, it won't be long before people read both papers and decide to try using procedure X to make Y nanotubes and then measure their ability to do Z. If no one can actually get to Z, then one or both of those papers was wrong, and the field will recognize that. The papers may not be formally retracted, but everyone will move on and stop referencing the incorrect papers.

[epistasis]

You're reversing what I'm trying to say, I'm saying that verification or invalidation causes citations to occur, not that citation is verification. And that work that doesn't get validated dies out. Even work that gets "invalidated" in some sense can reveal other truths, or necessary changes in paradigms.

This is why scientists check the citations of a paper when considering its contents. It's important to ask if other people followed up on this, and what have they found if they did follow up? New papers, without any citations, must be held in a state of meta-information, until there's follow up papers. Old papers with few citations, and no validation citations, must also be considered as in a state of meta-information. Sometimes, really important things like Mendel's genetics get lost for decades in this state, until they are rediscovered, but it's fairly rare.

[pygy_]

Work often gets cited without being either replicated or invalidated.

Do you do any kind of research? You seem to have an unrealistically rosy perception of the scientific process as it happens concretly.

[epistasis]

>Work often gets cited without being either replicated or invalidated.

I'm not sure why you're bringing up this fact, which is not at all inconsistent with my comment. What's your implication?

>Do you do any kind of research? You seem to have an unrealistically rosy perception of the scientific process as it happens concretely.

In the past decade, I've spent probably 70% of my time on scientific research. At this moment I'm procrastinating from writing a letter of support on a grant. What, in particular, do you think I'm unrealistically rosy about?

[pygy_]

> I'm not sure why you're bringing up this fact, which is not at all inconsistent with my comment. What's your implication?

In that case I may have misunderstood your point. What I mean is that, for a paper with 100+ citations (which, in some fields, is not rare), most of them are not verified by the authors.

> In the past decade, I've spent probably 70% of my time on scientific research. At this moment I'm procrastinating from writing a letter of support on a grant. What, in particular, do you think I'm unrealistically rosy about?

The self-correcting nature of the process is very slow in most cases. Bad results end up being forgotten for minor findings, but for things of mild interest, it may linger far longer.