The priority isn't about punishing you, or about your feelings or career at all. It's about the science.

If you cite something that turns out to be garbage, I'd imagine the procedure would be to remove the citation and to remove anything in the paper that depends on it, and to resubmit. If your paper falls apart without it, then it should be binned.

I can't think of a single paper that would fall apart to any of its cited papers being retracted. What field of science operates that way?

Science papers are novel contributions of data, and sometimes of purely computational methods. A data paper will stand on its own. A method paper will usually (or at least should) operate across multiple data sets to compare performance, or if only on a single dataset it's gonna to be a very well tested dataset.

If MNist turns out to be retracted, would we have to remove all the papers that used it over their years? That's about as deep as a citation can get into being fundamental and integral to a paper. And even in that case nearly any paper operating in that dataset will also be using other datasets. Sure, ignore a paper that only evaluates on a single retracted dataset, but why even bother retracting, as the paper would be ignored anyway, because what significant paper would use a single benchmark?

But 99.9% of citations have less bearing on a paper than being a fundamental dataset used to evaluate the claims in the paper. And those citations are inherently well-tested work product already.

So if people actually care about science, they would never even propose such a scheme. They would bother to at least understand what a citation was first.

You might not be at fault but your work depends on that wrong work, so your work is probably wrong too and readers should be aware of that. If it doesn't depend on it, then don't cite it! People cite the most ridiculous crap, especially in introductions listing common sense background knowledge with a random citation for every fact. That stuff doesn't really affect the paper so it could just be couched in one big "in my opinion" instead.

Academic papers have to cite related research to situate their contribution, even if they're not directly building on that research. When researchers can't reproduce a paper's results, they have to cite that paper when reporting that, or no one will know what they're talking about and the bad paper cannot be refuted. The whole system also needs many compare and contrast citations that aren't built on directly or at all, so you know what a paper is doing and not doing.

Yea, I hadn't really considered those kinds of citations. I was thinking of the piles of worthless citations that authors often put in simply because they're supposed to cite every fact, even if it's something that's common sense which they're not treating critically and doesn't affect their own work so they just did a quick search for any paper that made that claim.

> but your work depends on that wrong work, so your work is probably wrong

No, absolutely not, that's pure fallacy.

There might be some small subset of citations that work like a mathematical proof, but how many of these 4500 citations could you find that operate that way?

> There might be some small subset of citations that work like a mathematical proof

And even then, you're just weakening the result, not throwing it out entirely: instead of a proof of X that cites a proof of Y, you have a proof that Y implies X.