This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth.

Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.

In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.

Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.

In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.

Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.

From the article:

>> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.