Papers should not be retracted because they are unoriginal

Fundamentally, the goal of academic publication is dissemination of results and ideas. We want results and ideas disseminated as widely as possible so that they can be evaluated as thoroughly as possible, and so that as many people as possible can build on them in their own research. Recently, the Journal of Human Evolution retracted…

Equifinality and the burden of proof in archaeology: The Cerutti Mastodon site round 2

The Cerutti Mastodon is back in the pages of Nature, this time with a critique by Ferraro et al (2018) of the original report (Holen et al 2017), and a reply by Holen et al (2018).  As others have done (e.g. Braje et al 2017, Haynes 2017), Ferraro et al (2018) point out that the…