This line of publishing, much like nutritional science, is great for scientists. You can fudge data into flip flopping conclusions every couple of years. Infinite papers = tenure.
That's not to say there is no fraud, or bad actors. It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
But that's the point. It isn't "research". It's meaningless busy work to justify a paycheck.
> It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
I disagree. The guy was offering his honest opinion. Your comment comes off as someone working in the industry selfishly trying to justify your existence.
When hypothesis change wildly decade by decade (e.g. in nutrition research) without convergence, you can reason that the system isn't working as intended.
In the nutrition example, I think the lack of progress is due to inadequete data and tooling to tackle such a complex field, as well as the limitations imposed by ethical considerations.
Another issue is research bias due to funding from industry. I don't this should be as much of an issue since the efficacy of scientific methods should be mostly independent of funding source.
Heck, maybe you could even get tenure somewhere if you happened to have academic creds of your own.
Surely someone's done it? Are you familiar with any such profiles that you could share?
How not to get published: "The general consensus is right."
So although individuals may not flip-flop constantly, fields as a whole do. Pick almost any topic in almost any field (especially humanities) and read papers 10-20 years apart. There's a constant cycle.
The cycle becomes self reinforcing too, because now you can interact with previous criticisms (Dr. A said this, but Dr. B said he was wrong. In fact, A was correct because B neglected to consider...).
And yes, some fields aren’t able to perform the kind of reliable science of physics or chemistry, and so end up with a lot of papers that just collectively oscillate around topics.
But I have a hard time seeing how that’s what the above commenter was suggesting.
A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this:
How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong."
How to get published: "These specific other authors are right, and I have built upon the solid foundation laid by their brilliant work to do this other thing that may or may not have any actual utility or be of interest to anyone."
[UPDATE] I actually did once publish a paper [1] that explicitly described (some of) the reasons that one of the then-leading theories in my field was wrong and how I thought it could be improved. It was more or less the beginning of the end of my career. I don't know if there was any causal relationship between these two events, but there was definitely a temporal one.
And now that I reflect upon it, it wasn't even me who pointed out the problem, I was actually just citing Ralph Hartley who had pointed out the problems seven years earlier. He was, AFAICT, never heard from again either.