In science "there is no bad publicity": Papers criticized in comments have high scientific impact

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that criticized papers, often accompanied by comments, tend to have higher scientific impact and citation counts than non-commented papers, challenging the belief that comments diminish a paper's credibility.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence that commented papers are more highly cited, suggesting comments are early indicators of impactful research rather than indicators of low quality.

Findings

Commented papers are more cited than non-commented papers.

Commented papers are often among the most cited in their journal.

Comments serve as early indicators of high-impact papers.

Abstract

Comments are special types of publications whose aim is to correct or criticize previously published papers. For this reason, comments are believed to make commented papers less worthy or trusty to the eyes of the scientific community, and thus predestined to have low scientific impact. Here, we show that such belief is not supported by empirical evidence. We consider thirteen major publication outlets in science, and perform systematic comparisons between the citations accumulated by commented and non commented articles. We find that (i) commented papers are, on average, much more cited than non commented papers, and (ii) commented papers are more likely to be among the most cited papers of a journal. Since comments are published soon after criticized papers, comments should be viewed as early indicators of the future impact of criticized papers.