Timeline for answer to Why isn't it the norm to have research repeated immediately by other academics? by J...
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| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 2, 2021 at 8:44 | comment | added | EarlGrey | Your comment goes hand in hand with the pther answer academia.stackexchange.com/a/168411/128758 "Because a culture of 'Argument from Authority' has built up that regards peer-reviewed journal papers as a scientific 'gold standard', rather than a work-in-progress in need of verification." | |
| May 31, 2021 at 18:52 | comment | added | Clumsy cat | This answer matches my experience. My group normally replicate at least one or two plots from a paper we are building on, just to check our own data/equations/algorithms are good. Once we actually couldn't replicate part of a plot and we did discover an oversight in the other paper's methodology. It was minor, but important enough to mention in our paper. | |
| May 31, 2021 at 16:26 | comment | added | Captain Emacs | Agreed - that's why I said "it reminds me" rather than "it's like" :-) On the other hand, I detest having to give significance statements as a reviewer, as they pretend to be objective whereas only the future can be. Even Adleman from RSA seems to have thought their paper was quite a minor result with no major relevance. | |
| May 31, 2021 at 16:23 | comment | added | J... | @CaptainEmacs I think Pauli's statement is more about foolish hypotheses that are fundamentally un-testable - in this case, though, it's more about being simply irrelevant, whether correct, incorrect, genius (underappreciated), or rubbish(rightfully ignored). | |
| May 31, 2021 at 16:17 | comment | added | Captain Emacs | Quite so. It reminds me a bit of Pauli's "Not even wrong..." criticism. On the other hand, it's often hard to see which research is actually fruitful in the long run, which one is rubbish and which one is simply dormant. | |
| May 31, 2021 at 16:03 | comment | added | J... | @CaptainEmacs Yes, a few answers (like yours, +1) touched on this, but I felt the presentation could be inverted - (ie: frame challenge - we DO repeat important results, with caveats that garbage tends to get ignored). The fallacy in academia is usually to fail to appreciate just how much research is not particularly useful, whether it's correct or not. I think that clouds the perception of how repeating experiments works. | |
| May 31, 2021 at 15:52 | comment | added | Captain Emacs | Nice expansion of the terse second argument of my response. +1. | |
| May 31, 2021 at 15:16 | history | answered | J... | CC BY-SA 4.0 |