Thank you for a very informative and helpful reply! However, I would like to see this work validated before I fully accept his conclusions.

Regarding the 24%, if you look in Table 2 of that study, of the 12 that were "unchallenged and unreplicated", the notes for 10 list follow on studies that would reveal problems with the initial study, were the initial study to be "wrong."

That leaves 4% that are "unchallenged and unreplicated" yet have 1000 citations. So I would be quite interested to know the take of the researchers in the field on those papers, and if they would agree with Ioannidis' assessment on those 2 papers.

Say someone publishes a paper that has the conclusion: If you preform procedure X, you get carbon nanotubes with property Y.

Lets then go on to say that someone publishes a paper which states: carbon nanotubes with property Y will theoretically allow us to do Z.

If Z is something interesting and worthwhile, it won't be long before people read both papers and decide to try using procedure X to make Y nanotubes and then measure their ability to do Z. If no one can actually get to Z, then one or both of those papers was wrong, and the field will recognize that. The papers may not be formally retracted, but everyone will move on and stop referencing the incorrect papers.

You're reversing what I'm trying to say, I'm saying that verification or invalidation causes citations to occur, not that citation is verification. And that work that doesn't get validated dies out. Even work that gets "invalidated" in some sense can reveal other truths, or necessary changes in paradigms.

This is why scientists check the citations of a paper when considering its contents. It's important to ask if other people followed up on this, and what have they found if they did follow up? New papers, without any citations, must be held in a state of meta-information, until there's follow up papers. Old papers with few citations, and no validation citations, must also be considered as in a state of meta-information. Sometimes, really important things like Mendel's genetics get lost for decades in this state, until they are rediscovered, but it's fairly rare.