Your point about survival is well taken. Not only these papers are negative, but there is also a lawsuit [50] with accusations of fraud: https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/03/26/satrajit_vs_google.pdf
WDYM?
If you had secured tenure at a uni because of achieving the nature paper, and this happened, your head of department would quietly suggest you look elsewhere for employment because you won't be getting seniority in the department, ever.
You can publish shit in the minor outer planet regional journal of skeptical telekenesis, and nobody cares. If you publish a paper in Nature "we cured cancer" and it turns out you forgot to stir the lab reagents before adding them to the PCR machine, people care.
I think it’s honestly worse in other fields like cancer research where apparently >50% of the top cited papers don’t replicate. Read about the “Replication crisis”
EDIT: some more thoughts on issues. There really are 2 kinds of citations in research papers. One is the good kind of citation, that occurs when your method is so good that others use it and cite it. This unfortunately is very hard to do, even if your method is good it needs to be packaged well and researchers aren’t great SWEs. The second kind of citation is when, you get cited in related work of another paper that just states so and so method achieved so and so results on so and so benchmark. This kind of citation creates bad incentives, your goal is to be on top of some benchmark no matter what. So you start inventing benchmarks, tuning baselines to look bad etc. this citation is also easier to get so a majority of papers try to go for this instead. Maybe a solution is to just ban related works sections but who knows if that will work.
But if you have tenure then you can't be fired, no? Isn't that the role of tenure?
Presumably you're in the bad situation if you _don't_ have tenure?
Academics are as unethical as businessmen - and especially the overlap between tech and science research. As long as these researchers are bringing in grant money and getting press coverage (good or bad) they will keep their jobs or will be promoted.
If you do low quality science (incomplete methods and no reproducibility), other scientists are supposed to use robust evaluation to refute your claims.
Seems extremely straightforward, people just don’t like being shown to be incompetent.
On the other hand, it might this guys nose was out of joint because some co-published work was declined.
On the whole, I don't see how if the authors were academics with Tenure, they'd survive this one. This is entirely NOT how it's meant to work.Surely, it would be severely career limiting?
[1] Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mustafa Yaz- gan et al., “A Graph Placement Methodology for Fast Chip Design,” Nature 594 (2021), pp. 207-212. arXiv:2004.10746
[5] Sungmin Bae, Amir Yazdanbaksh, Satrajit Chatterjee, Mingyu Woo, Igor. L. Markov, et al., “Stronger Baselines for Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning in Chip Placement”, March, 2022.13 https://statmodeling. stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/ 2022/05/MLcontra.pdf
[6] MacroPlacement Repo. https://github. com/TILOS-AI-Institute/MacroPlacement
[7] Chung-Kuan Cheng, Andrew B. Kahng, Sayak Kundu, Yucheng Wang, Zhiang Wang, “As- sessment of Reinforcement Learning for Macro Placement”, ISPD 2023, arXiv:2302:11014