This study investigates whether negative citations in articles and comments posted on post-publication peer review platforms are both equally contributing to the correction of science. These 2 types of written evidence of disputes are compared by analyzing their occurrence in relation to articles that have already been retracted or corrected. We identified retracted or corrected articles in a corpus of 72,069 articles coming from the Engineering field, from 3 journals ( Science , Tumor Biology , Cancer Research ) and from 3 authors with many retractions to their credit (Sarkar, Schön, Voinnet). We used Scite to retrieve contradicting citations and PubPeer to retrieve the number of comments for each article, and then we considered them as traces left by scientists to contest published results. Our study shows that contradicting citations are very uncommon and that retracted or corrected articles are not more contradicted in scholarly articles than those that are neither retracted nor corrected but they do generate more comments on Pubpeer, presumably because of the possibility for contributors to remain anonymous. Moreover, post-publication peer review platforms, although external to the scientific publication process contribute more to the correction of science than negative citations. Consequently, post-publication peer review venues, and more specifically the comments found on it, although not contributing to the scientific literature, are a mechanism for correcting science. Lastly, we introduced the idea of strengthening the role of contradicting citations to rehabilitate the clear expression of judgment in scientific papers.

中文翻译：

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科学的自我修正：负面引用与发表后同行评审的比较研究

这项研究调查了文章中的负面引用和发表在出版后同行评审平台上的评论是否都同样有助于纠正科学。通过分析与已经撤回或更正的文章相关的发生情况来比较这两种类型的争议书面证据。我们在来自工程领域、3 种期刊（《科学》、《肿瘤生物学》、《癌症研究》）和 3 位作者（Sarkar、Schön、Voinnet）的 72,069 篇文章的语料库中发现了被撤回或更正的文章。我们使用 Scite 来检索矛盾的引文，使用 PubPeer 来检索每篇文章的评论数量，然后我们将它们视为科学家留下的痕迹，以对抗已发表的结果。我们的研究表明，自相矛盾的引用非常罕见，学术文章中被撤回或更正的文章并不比既未撤回也未更正的文章更矛盾，但它们确实在 Pubpeer 上产生了更多评论，大概是因为贡献者可能保持匿名。此外，出版后同行评审平台虽然在科学出版过程之外，但比负面引用更有助于纠正科学。因此，发表后的同行评审场所，更具体地说，是在其上发现的评论，虽然对科学文献没有贡献，但却是一种纠正科学的机制。最后，我们提出了加强反驳引用作用的想法，以恢复科学论文中判断的清晰表达。