In my academic career, I had one instance of reviewers actually reading a paper. Otherwise -- accept or reject -- the comments made clear the paper had never been actually read.
Retractions are non-existent, even with clearly proven academic malpractice.
[–] hasley 4 days ago
[–] blagie 3 days ago
Most of the rest of my papers were in completely different disciplines.
It was an awesome paper -- in my mind, groundbreaking -- but I'm not convinced anyone beyond the reviewers ever read it. I see about a dozen citations which popped up years later, clicked through a few, and they were inane.
Problem is it was work in a very, very classical field, alongside Butterworth, Chebyshev, and similar, and while quite fundamental, and with many applications, there is no contemporary research there.
My most popular papers were mostly rather.... random.
[–] harry8 3 days ago
[–] Grimblewald 3 days ago
Retractions do happen as well, especially if it's clearly proven malpractice. I've been behind 2 retractions so far, but it has never (in my experience) happened at the "contact corresponding author and seek clarification" stage of escalation. Typically it requires escalation to the journal itself.
Usually I got quite critical comments (positive and/or negative). Yes, sometimes a reviewer does not write even a single sentence before giving an average score to complete the review process. But this has not been the regular case.
And as a reviewer for a conference paper of 4 to 6 pages, I usually assigned 1 to 3 hours to read it (journal papers: 1 to 2 days) and to give comments.