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StableAlkyne 3 hours ago

Every field and every publisher has this issue though.

I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"

Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.

If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.

*Usually it's actually one of their grad students