People in academia always have a pressing career goal. Especially the best of them do not get bogged down by minor issues. I'm not talking about actual fraud here, just a bit of sloppiness that doesn't invalidate the results, but religiously adhering to meticulous standards is not profitable for researchers.
The primary goal is to publish the paper, go to conferences, meet others and network.
While it's not a dichotomy, who will be seen as "better"? Someone who spent tons of time to write reproducible clean code with tests, tracked down all minor details and pondered about things that may change the results by 0.1 percent, or someone who was a bit sloppy but got 3 publications in the meantime and got to know famous professors at conferences?
Attitudes like this determine your success. If nobody values or indeed even sees or knows about your efforts, those efforts are practically wasted. "I'm a really detail oriented person" doesn't have the same ring to it as another few papers on your CV.
I may sound cynical but the other extreme, idealism is not useful either.
> While it's not a dichotomy, who will be seen as "better"? Someone who spent tons of time to write reproducible clean code with tests, tracked down all minor details and pondered about things that may change the results by 0.1 percent, or someone who was a bit sloppy but got 3 publications in the meantime and got to know famous professors at conferences?
Since 2018 I have tried to publish at least one paper debunking something every year. So far, if anything, being more careful has led me to publish more, not less. Admittedly, I don't think everyone should be as careful as I am as people would quickly run into diminishing returns, but the idea that being careful necessarily means publishing less has not been true in my experience.
Also, I don't think the typical case is something changing the results by 0.1%. In my experience when I catch an error it's usually larger than that. The first debunking paper I published was about something that was one or two orders of magnitude off the correct value in the typical case, but still received 300 citations...
Ultimately I think it would be best if an academic field adopts uniform standards for publication. That way, a sloppy researcher can't pump out 3 bad papers. Many academic communities have nominal standards that are not enforced. Some examples are discussed here: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1141709
It often feels like a quixotic fight. Strong claims sell papers, but are hard to stand behind for a researcher with high standards, who is very critical of overall practices in a field. Their "best" recourse in the idealistic sense would be to publish an overarching meta analysis of the field, and pointing out problematic practices, gaining enemies and being labeled as a crusader.
In my field, computer vision, a major problem is uncomparable setups, far reaching claims etc. A major pattern is introducing some fancy model, showing that it gets a bit better results that could well be due to noise or some tuning on the test set (not even secretly, just trying many different things and putting the bold formatting on your best number and claiming it as SOTA). Whether it was really due to your fancy model or not is hard to prove. But my experience is that mundane, pedestrian changes in a model introduce way bigger performance changes than whether or not you use the fancy module or architectural tweak that is proposed in mediocre published works. Which also means you can absolutely not compare models created by different people, especially when the performance gap is small. Tiny details can screw up the whole ordering, so trying to interpret the order and draw conclusions from it is equivalent to reading tea leaves.
Now surely this applies mostly to mediocre research. But that is the majority. Top of the line research is more solid, but if you're a small unknown researcher, your best strategy is to start getting out there, publish and network.
and tell me why i should ever trust something from someone who
swaps the location of towns on a map, while the point of said paper is about the spreading of the plague along trade routes.
Because people will make mistakes. If you expect papers to be 100% accurate, you'll always be disappointed. You have to account for possible mistakes. Whether they're accidental or misleading on purpose is to a degree irrelevant at first - we should always watch out for them.
Even in situations where mistakes cost lives, we put multiple failsafes and reviews and clear instructions in place - and still say they reduce the likelihood, rather than prevent accidents.
Given the paper already appears to have a correction for something minor, one more would seem appropriate, yes - it’s a pretty jarring error.
But it’s just disingenuous to say it affects (let alone “invalidates”) the actual study.
And shouldn’t a proper pedant spot that the top pin isn’t even where Lübeck is - that’s Rostock.
Does the swap in the position of the two cities compromise the findings in any way? If not, it's an irrelevant mistake like misspelling a word. What do you expect them to do? retract the paper because they misspelled a word?
It could, because in the timeframe the paper is about, they were geographically near, but had no real direct connection to speak of. Traveling over land along branches of the 'old salt routes' took at least two days, and that was fast. They were
transport hubs of different branches of the early Hanseatic League.
The primary goal is to publish the paper, go to conferences, meet others and network.
While it's not a dichotomy, who will be seen as "better"? Someone who spent tons of time to write reproducible clean code with tests, tracked down all minor details and pondered about things that may change the results by 0.1 percent, or someone who was a bit sloppy but got 3 publications in the meantime and got to know famous professors at conferences?
Attitudes like this determine your success. If nobody values or indeed even sees or knows about your efforts, those efforts are practically wasted. "I'm a really detail oriented person" doesn't have the same ring to it as another few papers on your CV.
I may sound cynical but the other extreme, idealism is not useful either.