Scientists almost never negatively cite papers, and actually never do for incompetence or bad methodologies, so this is not a problem in practice [1]. In fact they don't even notice when citing retracted papers [2] so good luck getting them to notice deeper problems.
The reality is, a citation is always either neutral or a positive reference to other work.
Good points, and good to see there's some data behind that as well. That's how it's seemed to me in my areas. I'm not sure to what degree it applies for things like psychology - prob never as extreme as my original example, but it would be interesting to see a similar study.
The reality is, a citation is always either neutral or a positive reference to other work.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/13823 - only ~2.5% of citations are negative. Of those virtually all are about the findings, not the methodology.
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974415/