I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…
Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code.
The people to blame here aren't the students themselves. They just wrote up a mildly interesting observation and put it up on a repository. The people to blame are journalists and internet dumbasses who used this paper to serve their own selfish ends.
> I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled.
There's no denying the existence of a lot of peer-reviewed junk science but sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why papers with faulty conclusions are accepted. The question addressed by the paper might be interesting, the experimental methodology might be interesting, the data sources used in the research might be interesting, or the editors/program committee might just want to highlight the lack of progress in an area that deserves more attention.
Publishing something that is completely fault-free isn't a desirable or even an achievable goal. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific publishing. The goal of scientific publication is to advance the field by stimulating discussion at the boundaries of human knowledge. This can often be done even with "buggy" results. Think of it as the scientific equivalent of fail often, fail early and fail fast mantra that drives many startups.
I'm not dismissing your frustration though because the problem you've described is a real one. We aren't very good at communicating scientific results to laypersons. But unlike you, I don't have a glib solution to a problem I don't fully understand. Magazines like the communications of the ACM with accessible, professionally-edited articles written by experts in the field are probably one step in the right direction, but there is a lot more that needs to be done here.