I've taken a crack at revising the title, though not a very good crack - it's better to use language from the article itself and I didn't do that in this case. If anyone wants to comb through the article and find a representative phrase that would be more suitable, we'll happily edit it again.
A better title:
Economist points out some economists had been using a dodgy source; cites other economists who had pointed this out adding to literature of checking citations and a growing body of literature on checking claims in economic history in particular [editorial: as these feed into pop science years down the road]
"Widely used historical population time series mostly guesswork" would be a more accurate title, though you might get a few "water is wet" replies :)
Econ papers vary widely in quality. The lack of a quantifier could be taken to mean this is the new unrepresentative lab rats.