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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

Retracting a paper should only be done in select situations, like fraud, plagiarism or violating ethical guidelines. Was any of that present? If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields. Furthermore you would leave a blind spot in the research, other researchers might try and pursue those retracted ideas not realizing they are dead ends.

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I agree, but it's not clear from the article if the paper is even wrong.

As I understand it there's robust evidence in support of the hypothesis itself (GMVH), and this paper was an attempt to model how the effect could come about.

It looks to me more like it was retracted for being distasteful to the journal editor's wife.

According to the author and a publisher no scientific criticism has been offered.

Suppose some had. Almost every paper has some shortcomings on which it can be validly criticized. But how much criticism those shortcomings generate, and if that criticism results in a retraction or academic censure, depends on if the paper dared to endanger any modern-day holy cows.

> If you retract papers that were just 'wrong' you would be retracting at least 50% of the work published in a lot of fields.

Wouldn't that be a win? Don't people read & reference these published, reviewed, non-retracted 'wrong' papers with the assumption that they are right?

A competent researcher wouldn't make that assumption. Random idiots might do so, though.

A retracted paper doesn't disappear from the surface of the world. It is still indexed in commercial and institutional repositories, some of which will also have copies. Retracting is the right thing to do if the authors or editors want to show that they cannot vouch for what they have published.

"Retracting is the right thing to do if the authors or editors want to show that they cannot vouch for what they have published."

Alternatively, they might have retracted to have the bullying and intimidation stop.

It's like saying a kid hands over his lunch money everyday to the school bully because he realizes his mom actually wants the bully to have more spending power. Or the business owner truly wants to hire the mobster as clearly you never know when some random pyromaniac decides he feels a bit cold.

This is clearly a case where it was redacted due to pressure. This is the classical and most relevant threat to science.

Then you could as well argue peer review should not look at methodology, but only for fraud, plagiarism and ethics violations. A retraction can in some cases be seem as a delayed failed (broader) peer review.

Methodology is part of fraud and maybe ethics. It's also required in the future for meta analysis. It might be that published papers disagree on the topic. If there are problems with methodology you can't really use the data as it's noise (at best).

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