My question sparked for your request of a RESEARCH article and not a "normal" blog post.
I would like to know why you want a "research" article, that I assumed being an academic article, instead of a blog post.
This article comes up with a tool measuring the half-life of the code and demonstrates it on some project. What I was requested as an addition is the discussion of correlation of this metric with other metrics.
Being said that, a "paper" makes a difference compared to a "blog post" at some cases. Sometimes, in order to convince your directors and project managers about your change proposals to the programming processes, you need to support your idea with more serious work.
For example, in my previous company, I could use such an academic research in order to demand more time budget for "code-cleanup" periods where the team focuses just to re-writing the parts of legacy code, instead of bugfixes and new features.
I am surprised that this small request offended someone.
What left me wonder is the assumption that an academic paper is more serious than a blog post; I frequent the academic and that is just not true, especially in our field.
Then, of course, upper management may not share this point of view.
We are openly discussing the article, we are deciding what we do like and what we don't like about it and we are deciding if the article is worth our attention.
How it is different from an academic peer review process?
Sure the academic peer review processes are blind, but those are a double edge sword.