We also mustn't forget that typing search queries is only one part of literature searching. Using the reference sections of related publications gives us an idea of how sources relate to each other. I often recommend my students start there rather than jumping straight into a Google Scholar search.

I remember this. In my case, the database was PsycInfo or what preceded it (PsycLit?). On CD-ROM. I don't miss the barely legible photocopies from struggling machines. But we were more likely actually to read them than the hundreds of PDFs at our fingertips now.

I never understood why they do that.

Errors being introduced post-acceptance? Yes, I've seen that. I'm not sure what the reasons are.

Yes, I have worked on this. Would you like to send me a message with more details?

Why would we want to waste our painstaking (inductive) analysis on some sweeping statement that our data can't justify? The logic is more about future research engaging with the ideas and improving rather than refuting them. Offering a building block rather than throwing down the gauntlet.

So yes, I'd say that falsifiability is a non-entity in qualitative research. Not because the ideas can't possibly be wrong, but because falsifiability is so strongly tied to hypothetico-deductivism that it's not so relevant outside of hypothesis-testing methods. Different starting and end points.

I think this may be because an inductive analysis starts with the data and tries to make sense of it in the best possible way. To end up with something so indefensible that it could be called false would be a comprehensive failure. All qualitative methods I know have procedures to check validity.

Even in grounded theory, as far as I understand, the aim is not to create a falsifiable theory but to refine it until it works. In interpretative methods, conclusions can of course be contested or methods compared with some quality criterion or another. But "false" is an odd word in this context.

That's tricky. The question may not make the same sense to everyone. Qualitative methods are used with different epistemologies, which may be linked to whether and how falsifiability matters. They have in common that they don't test hypotheses, so falsifiability is certainly a less central concern.

There are also ineffective systems. I get review requests practically every day. So of course I say no to most. Some are far outside my field, but the system thinks I'm an expert because I used the same method in a different field. And some are the reviews I already declined last week. Annoying.