It has always bothered me when certain scientific publications get a lot of popular press despite the fact that the results are not that revolutionary. But the general public probably does not care to learn about a discovery in some esoteric discipline, so I understand that bias. What irks me more is the bias in high impact journals to publish sexy publications even if the science is limited. A correspondence to Nature addresses this issue:
"The broad audience of Nature forces its editors to pre-screen papers according to how appealing they will be for its readers, even if appeal and importance do not always go hand in hand. This is absolutely legitimate, given the broad character of the journal, given its independence (it is a private enterprise, after all) and given the fact that any author can choose whether to submit papers to Nature or not.
"But special consideration is due to the growing weight that authoring papers in Nature is acquiring in personal curricula. Gratifying though this must be for Nature's editors, it has the slightly worrying implication that bright young scientists are beginning to be driven more by the appeal of a potential paper than by its importance -- a trend to which the scientific community should find a response."
One paper I have written about before exemplifies the type of publications that make it into Nature from my field.
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this sux. psychologists have economists have noted this sort of bias before....
Nature is owned by the multinational publishing house MacMillan, which according to the corporate web site also owns publications like The Royal & Ancient Golfer's Handbook, The Daily Telegraph Century Of Sport, the Let's Go travel guides and The Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries. I suspect that the bean counters there are somewhat more interested in the bottom line than in their contributions to science.
I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the output in Nature, especially in the discussion sections of many of these papers. They are often rife with speculation that doesn't make much sense and conclusions that were refuted years ago...which are then idiotically touted in the mainstream press.
Science, on the other hand, despite being similarly broad in nature and large in distribution, does seem to be more rigorous. I wonder if others have felt the same way?
Science, on the other hand, despite being similarly broad in nature and large in distribution, does seem to be more rigorous. I wonder if others have felt the same way?
yes.
perhaps it is british tabloid press culture seeping in.
huh, during my year in Britain I always felt that their tabloid culture was in many ways more science-literate than ours.
Science has it's own limitations. For one thing, Nature publishes a lot more research that interests me than Science. Additionally, Nature also publishes Nature Genetics and Nature Reviews Genetics which are both excellent journals (Nature Genetics also publishes higher quality papers than Nature). Finally, Science has gotten a bit of flak (I think driven by Michael Ashburner) for publishing a Celera genome paper even though the data was not publicly available. That lead to some genome consortiums to boycott Science and only publish their results in Nature.
you make a good point, but I don't agree with your choice of the volatility paper as an example of bad science. I'm a microbiologist, not a population geneticist, but that paper struck me as being a really good idea and one of the best population-level uses of genome sequencing. I guess I don't understand the virulent opposition from the pop gen community. If Nature was aiming at provoking debate, they certainly succeeded.
Greigite,
Read the critiques of the codon volatility paper. In addition to the points they bring up, codon volatility only depends on a couple of codons that affect volatility -- most codons/amino acids have absolutely no effect on the metric. I have not met a single person who takes it seriously.
RPM--
I think the Celera genome paper you mention was their human genome paper. Not only was the data not made publicly available, but they actually failed to assemble the genome using their data (it had to be "supplemented" with data from the public project). Check out this article.
That Celera paper was one of the most astounding examples of politically inspired publication. Not a bad deal for them: publish someone else's data and get a free trip to the White House.
The volatility paper was an excellent choice. My colleague Dan Graur was fuming for about 6 months... The critiques (his and others') were devastating: the scientific process at its best!
Of course Nature have published their fair share of embarassing papers over the years (e.g., directed mutation, cold fusion, memory of water), while rejecting good ones (I didn't know about the PCR paper -- my favorite example is the Krebs cycle paper). Even so, I too find myself reading more papers from Nature than from Science.
Dan Graur has a bit of a history of writing scathing reviews. This one is my favorite.
Nature has blotted its copy-book on more than one occasion. Back in the early 1970s it published a paper claiming Uri Geller had paranormal powers. Fortunately James Randi took a sceptical look at the procedures used by the investigators and showed them to be seriously flawed.
In the late 1980s Nature saw fit to publish a paper purporting to show water has a "memory", much to the delight of homeopaths. Once again Randi was involved in showing just how bad the laboratory procedure was.
About 10 years ago a paper on the molecular phylogeny of cetaceans appeared in the same journal. This claimed baleen whales did not appear until the Middle Miocene (c 16 - 11 Ma) and that paleontologists who said otherwise were misled. A colleague of mine who happens to be one of the leading cetacean paleontologists, took exception to this claim and wrote to Nature pointing out there are perfectly good fossil baleens dating back to the Early Oligocene (c 28 - 34 Ma). Nature - for reasons it never bothered to give - refused to publish his letter. However, he was later involved in another study by molecular biologists (mostly from Japan) that showed there was no conflict with the fossils. The paper, needless to say, did not appear in Nature.
Very important work has been published in Nature, but a degree of scepticism never goes amiss.