Great points! Re peer-review, I think that your argument makes sense but I feel like most of the impact on quality from better peer review would actually be in raising standards for the field as a whole, rather than the direct impact on the papers who didn’t pass peer review. I’d love to have a much clearer analysis of the whole situation :)
That view seems reasonable to me and I agree that a clearer analysis would be useful.
An additional and very minor point I missed out from my comment is that I’m sceptical that the relationship between impact factor and retraction (original paper here) is causal. It seems very likely to me that something like “number of views of articles” would be a confounder, and it is not adjusted for as far as I can tell. I’m not totally sure that is the part of the article that you were referring to when citing this, so apologies if not!
Great points! Re peer-review, I think that your argument makes sense but I feel like most of the impact on quality from better peer review would actually be in raising standards for the field as a whole, rather than the direct impact on the papers who didn’t pass peer review. I’d love to have a much clearer analysis of the whole situation :)
That view seems reasonable to me and I agree that a clearer analysis would be useful.
An additional and very minor point I missed out from my comment is that I’m sceptical that the relationship between impact factor and retraction (original paper here) is causal. It seems very likely to me that something like “number of views of articles” would be a confounder, and it is not adjusted for as far as I can tell. I’m not totally sure that is the part of the article that you were referring to when citing this, so apologies if not!