I've had people play this game on several of my papers under review. Reviews will say something like "high quality submission but the authors should consider including work X for completeness" etc where it's obvious that work X was written by the reviewer. As an author, I just found some place to plausibly cite the work and moved on. The quality or validity of my manuscript was not impacted in any way. In my admittedly limited experience, reviewers will rarely green light obviously inferior work just to get an additional citation as it impacts their reputation and it's an inefficient way to stat pad (self-citation or trading citations with your collaborators is by far the most efficient way to pump citation count, especially in the context of review papers). Additionally, obviously inferior works don't even make it to the peer review process; they are rejected by the journal editors in a first pass screen.
There are more insidious games people play that DO impact publication quality, such as requesting friendly reviewers (this mechanism is normally legitimately used to help editors route manuscripts for review to domain experts), submitting work to journals where the PI is an editor / has relationships with editors, attaching well known PIs to manuscripts to add the appearance of legitimacy even though they did no work and were not involved at all, etc. These are problems that won't go away because there are far too many researchers and not enough money / positions to go around, so people are heavily incentivized to play games.
People imagine science as this serious rigorous thing where everything is objective and unbiased careful "monks" investigate all the details with scrutiny. When actually it's often like a bazaar. You have to sway the reviewer with overinflated claims and "sell yourself" in a way that fully contradicts the scientific virtue of self-skepticism (finding reasons why you're wrong, not right). There's also a lot of who knows/likes who and subjective human factors. These are all obvious for people after a few months or 1-2 years as a researcher, but science has a very different image for laypeople who mostly know about it from school, mostly results that were produced in a different era. The number of scientists has exploded recently, there are tons and tons of papers written and they are all supposed to be some novel discovery and this great leap forward, which is clearly unrealistic at this scale. At the same time thorough analysis and skeptical papers are "boo"-ed down, seen as confrontational and are undervalued compared to sexy new claims.
Many institutions have become paper mills. Raw metrics like paper counts and citation counts have replaced careful consideration in many evaluations, it's basically an industrial scale mechanized process. Feels like a house of cards that can not be kept up indefinitely. The reputation of science will be hurt for sure as the public starts to find out more.
I share your conclusion but hope that science itself prevails, that this state we're in now is part of the "self-cleansing" property of science and that specific scientists will be held accountable instead of the concept of science. But I can only hope for now.
* Genome sequencing.
* New malaria drugs.
* Graphene.
* Better batteries.
* Deep learning.
* fMRI.
* CRISPR.
From the outside, the public doesn't care about the trials and tribulations of PhDs. Or irrelevant puffed up papers. Or the organisational politics of research.
And I'd say the system is still of concern for the public. Few readers of pop science articles recognize when they are essentially reading a pr marketing piece, and not something like a consensus textbook-like description of consolidated knowledge. The authors have special interests and biases beyond uncovering the truth, such as pressure for publication counts, tenure possibilities, filling your CV, all sorts of political considerations, flag planting, etc.
Another thing is how these discoveries are made. I think people imagine it as if researchers research and ponder about things, then when they find something, they write it up to share it with the world and contribute their new found interesting knowledge. I know someone who did that in his PhD, he quit after several years without any paper submissions. When asked, he said he hasn't found anything yet worth publishing. In most places, people decide in advance that they're going to have a paper this year for this journal/conference and then they plan a solid way there. You decide what result would be sexy (keeping some secondary plans in place) and then do the whole thing. Several times things will not go as you expect, but the paper must be written. Then you rewrite history and come up with ridiculous "storylines" to make it seem like all your hypotheses naturally flow from prior work and everything fits in this nice story. Then you torture the data until it sings because there must be a paper. You look for the smallest indication of something interesting, inflate it to sound like a breakthrough, speculate about far reaching conclusions etc. And then if your university has a good pr department, journalists will eat it all up and you'll be out in the media, impacting normal people's understanding as well.
(I realize I may be a bit too cynical here, and I exaggerate somewhat to get the message through.)
Also I put it to you that serious researchers are rarely misled by low quality, vacuous papers. That kind of work will be ignored by history.
So I agree that what you're pointing out is something of a problem, but may not constitute a cataclysm.
A more open peer-review system would help this issue and expose abusers like this, but it's not clear (to me) how such a system could work... At least this issue does not directly affect the quality of research, but rather corrupt the already noisy quality metric of citation count.
It is a bit different than design docs/code review in the sense that, there are N different authors competing to grab a place in conference or journal -- so they may try to game the system, while in case of design docs/codereview there is no such competition.
Science doesn't work by noble individuals scrupulously following rules that they could ignore if they chose to.
Where science works, it works by incentivising one scientist to tear apart the next scientist's position. There's no better way to avoid having your argument torn apart than for it to be genuinely solid.
This is aptly demonstrated by Nature tearing into Elsevier...
The time to get really worried is when you stop hearing anything like this and get a message only of, 'Everything is fine, nothing to see here'.
This is very true. In my graduate education that came out loud and clear - your job is to try and punch holes in other people’s work. If you find a hole, it’s their job to fill it.
That’s what good science looks like.
Whatever you're proposing as the alternative to science has the same problem: it's implemented by imperfect humans.
What's your alternative?
You're taking that a tad too far. Remember, for long periods of time, certain disciplines were considered to be "science" which weren't quite that. It's not just individual personal failings.
How do you know turning lead into gold isn't possible? Science. How do you know ether and phlogiston aren't real? Science. How do you know it's not aberrant for women to have large clitori? Well "aberrant" is subjective, so that's really not even a scientific claim, so science certainly can't be blamed for that. How do you know it's not medically beneficial to cut off males' foreskins? Science.
You can't accuse science of screwing up those beliefs: science is the only reason you know those beliefs are wrong. These are examples of science working.
This subthread started with me saying "Science is incorruptible. Scientists are not. Don't conflate the imperfections of the humans implementing science as being problems with science." If anything, your examples prove my point. What you've shown is that scientists have believed some wildly inaccurate things in the past, and science has corrected them.
The point is that even science isn't well-defined and we need to be super flexible.
Huh? No it doesn't. This is complete nonsense.
The scientific method would deal with this by hypothesizing that A combined with B might do something, then testing the hypothesis, and discovering that it does. Generating that hypothesis might be difficult--nobody said science was easy. But there's nothing about the scientific method that can't handle the situation you propose.
There are hundreds of examples of this. Try, for example, hydrochloric acid and baking soda as your A and B--I've never mixed these two and don't know what they produce, but based on my knowledge of acids and baking soda, I hypothesize they will result in CO2, even though neither of these decomposes into that gas by itself.