But is there really much to prove? What's the baseline? I mean, we're talking about a field where this got published - and it was not a hoax:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/030913251562336...
The people behind this hoax had an unenviable task of matching and beating a paper like that (since, apparently, by itself it was not sufficient to prove the point). How would you do so?
I think there's some amount of feminist theory that boils down to -- all of the people thinking/doing stuff in A field were men operating under B culture; what if we thought about things from a different perspective & revisited some of our assumptions?
Like most fields, I bet glaciology has some underlying assumptions (is the goal of glaciology to manage glaciers? navigation?) & history (which glaciers have people historically studied? are they representative?)
And I know as an outsider, it's really hard to tell what's valuable about another field. If an outsider was critiquing computer science, I bet they'd easily be able to track down studies about tabs vs. spaces and laugh at the silly stuff that gets published in that field.
Here, for example, is a reference to a bad paper published in a field which is not usually the target of this kind of criticism:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...
Besides, the paper in question wasn't merely published - the author got a prestigious NSF award that lists that paper:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1253779
This, to me, implies that either such papers are considered broadly acceptable in the field, or they're not actually read. Not sure which is worse.
You're confused about how NSF grants work. The publication is listed as an output. The grant was awarded before that paper was published. The listing of the paper on that page implies nothing about its quality.
My example paper was torn down by mathematicians, not diabetes researchers.