No surprise to me, sad to say.

Most important is that the two articles were withdrawn. I posted here before about Retraction Watch. While enlightening in its format, it is just another example of the peer review that suddenly became highly visible across all sciences.

The Internet and Web multiplied the capacity for communication. Letters no longer take weeks to cross the Atlantic on a sailing ship. We no longer pay 15 cents a word to read a telegram, or wait while an operator connects two telephones.

Review has always been a step in the scientific method. That is why scientists publish. But through the decades of discovery, more emphasis was on publishing new materials, not revisiting previous works. That has changed. It appears to have been a paradigm shift in the practice of science.

The reductio would be a culture of science that contemplates its navel, always reviewing the existing works, and never creating new ones. Historically, some cultures fell into that broadly. China and Europe both knew times when studying old scholars was the essence of scholarship. We still have remnants of this. You can find journals for Aristotleans and Platonists... and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies... But we have no journals for Ptolemaic Studies or Applied Phlogiston. So, maybe science is safe for now.