Actually, as the replication crises shows, most smoke from papers either isn't real / doesn't point to a fire. So that maybe is a flawed line of reasoning. Correlation (if the research is done carefully to avoid intentional or unintentional p-hacking, and free of fraud) can point to maybe do a follow-up study (or do lots of different kinds of studies to do a good meta analysis that can try to establish causation) but the replication crisis indicates the good studies are swamped by the meaningless ones.
Actually, as the replication crises shows, most smoke from papers either isn't real / doesn't point to a fire. So that maybe is a flawed line of reasoning. Correlation (if the research is done carefully to avoid intentional or unintentional p-hacking, and free of fraud) can point to maybe do a follow-up study (or do lots of different kinds of studies to do a good meta analysis that can try to establish causation) but the replication crisis indicates the good studies are swamped by the meaningless ones.