The editor of the journal Remote Sensing just resigned over the fact that his journal published a paper that should never have been published. Real Climate explains what that means – being controversial or eventually shown wrong is *not* an indication that a paper shouldn’t have been published. This is what makes a paper bad:
But what makes a paper ‘bad’ though? It is certainly not a paper that simply comes to a conclusion that is controversial or that goes against the mainstream, and it isn’t that the paper’s conclusions are unethical or immoral. Instead, a ‘bad’ paper is one that fails to acknowledge or deal with prior work, or that makes substantive errors in the analysis, or that draws conclusions that do not logically follow from the results, or that fails to deal fairly with alternative explanations (or all of the above). Of course, papers can be mistaken or come to invalid conclusions for many innocent reasons and that doesn’t necessarily make them ‘bad’ in this sense.
The Finch and Pea 