Not even surprised. My daughter tried to reproduce a well-cited paper a couple of years back as part of her research project. It was not possible. They pushed for a retraction but university don't want to do it because it would cause political issues as one of the peer-reviewers is tenured at another closely associated university. She almost immediately fucked off and went to work in the private sector.

Nowadays high citation numbers don't mean anymore what they used to. I've seen too many highly cited papers with issues that keep getting referenced, probably because people don't really read the sources anymore and just copy-paste the citations.

On my side-project todo list, I have an idea for a scientific service that overlays a "trust" network over the citation graph. Papers that uncritically cite other work that contains well-known issues should get tagged as "potentially tainted". Authors and institutions that accumulate too many of such sketchy works should be labeled equally. Over time this would provide an additional useful signal vs. just raw citation numbers. You could also look for citation rings and tag them. I think that could be quite useful but requires a bit of work.

Family member tried to do work relying on previous results from a biotech lab. Couldn’t do it. Tried to reproduce. Doesn’t work. Checked work carefully. Faked. Switched labs and research subject. Risky career move, but. Now has a career. Old lab is in mental black box. Never to be touched again.

Talked about it years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867

Others said they’d never seen it. So maybe it’s rare. But no one will tell you even if they encounter. Guaranteed career blackball.

did “not impact the main text, analyses, or findings.”

Made me think of the black spoon error being off by a factor of 10 and the author also said it didn't impact the main findings.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/13/how-a-simp...

> This doesn’t mean that the authors of that paper are bad people!

> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things

> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing

I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.

Being practical, and understanding the gamification of citation counts and research metrics today, instead of going for a replication study and trying to prove a negative, I'd instead go for contrarian research which shows a different result (or possibly excludes the original result; or possibly doesn't even if it does not confirm it).

These probably have bigger chance of being published as you are providing a "novel" result, instead of fighting the get-along culture (which is, honestly, present in the workplace as well). But ultimately, they are (research-wise! but not politically) harder to do because they possibly mean you have figured out an actual thing.

Not saying this is the "right" approach, but it might be a cheaper, more practical way to get a paper turned around.

Whether we can work this out in research in a proper way is linked to whether we can work this out everywhere else? How many times have you seen people tap each other on the back despite lousy performance and no results? It's just easier to switch private positions vs research positions, so you'll have more of them not afraid to highlight bad job, and well, there's this profit that needs to pay your salary too.