> Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance?
Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're just wrong. Or if not just wrong, they've got some critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem to get this.
Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the thousands now), the number that I think are/were unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it would be neat to go back to the source material for such an important discovery.
What I didn't realize is that the original paper was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I was chastened. I should have gone into it with the attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe that their textbook was wrong!
Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely definitive when it first gets published. These "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a fawning/sensational/scary article about something after they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question nothing within the article itself, are tremendous hacks.
Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're just wrong. Or if not just wrong, they've got some critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem to get this.
Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the thousands now), the number that I think are/were unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it would be neat to go back to the source material for such an important discovery.
What I didn't realize is that the original paper was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I was chastened. I should have gone into it with the attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe that their textbook was wrong!
Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely definitive when it first gets published. These "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a fawning/sensational/scary article about something after they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question nothing within the article itself, are tremendous hacks.