This very nice paper appeared at the same time as my paper on the theory crisis (aka “reproducibility” crisis) in experimental psychology was accepted for publication (Phaf, 2020a). Otherwise, I certainly would have cited it as further evidence of the problematic publication practice (PPP) “Survival of discredited hypotheses”. In my view on the quasi-evolutionary dynamics of science, it is essential that all publications should contribute to the selection of the most “adaptive” hypotheses, and to the discarding of “maladaptive” hypotheses. The affirmative citation bias noted by Letrud and Hernes (2019) shows that competition between hypotheses has become dysfunctional in the present publication deluge and that scientific developments may have effectively come to a halt. Indeed, the alarmingly high number of “citation diversions” (a type of citation distortion; Greenberg, 2009) seems to indicate that authors do not read many of the papers they cite, and consequently do not enter the alternative hypotheses into competition. I also have been on the receiving end of such citation diversions and at the time found it rather startling. Our meta-analysis on emotional Stroop (Phaf & Kan, 2007), which challenged fast automatic Stroop interference in the emotional domain, was frequently cited in support of such automaticity.

Editors and reviewers of scientific journals need to become more critical of these theoretically deficient papers and should reject them if they do not succeed in faithfully contrasting their underlying theoretical hypotheses. “The ideal of a linear development of science will never be fulfilled, but we will take fewer side roads, or even may avoid getting lost in the forest of research data if theoretical competition at publication is intensified.” (p.5, Phaf, 2020b)


References
Greenberg, S.A. (2009). How citation distortions create unfounded authority: Analysis of a citation network. Bmj, 339, b2680.
Letrud, K., & Hernes, S. (2019). Affirmative citation bias in scientific myth debunking: A three-in-one case study. PloS one, 14(9).
Phaf, R.H. (2020a). Publish less, read more. Theory & Psychology.
Phaf, R.H. (2020b). Publish less, read more: Replies to Clegg, Wiggins, and Ostenson; and to Trafimow. Theory & Psychology.
Phaf, R.H., & Kan, K.J. (2007). The automaticity of emotional Stroop: A meta-analysis. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 38, 184-199.