I thought there was something funny about the abstract...most abstracts in high profile journals have a much different tone.
Sometimes the curation role of a journal is important and peer review can identify errors. In this case it seems like access to the right geological formations by competent scientists is key and I read nothing in the paper made me question the science. I don’t think the lack of journal prestige diminishes the significance of this specific paper; it probably reflects the modern relevance of this extinction event.
Open access journals like Advances or Nature Communications are not that bad, but Nature Scientific Reports is horrible.
It's very low impact journal with minimum review. It's intended to be place for grey literature where technical reports and scientific reports with no importance go. Unfortunately it has started to publish junk science too. Those pieces get posted into HN frequently. All that happens under nature.com that makes them seem legit.
And junk science? Please provide links.
More on Scientific Reports, And on Faked Papers https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mo...
They are supposed to do very light peer review just trying to check if the article is technically sound. Apparently even that review process is broken.
As a matter of fact you can get plenty of crap into the higher tier Science/Nature journals if you just tell a good enough story about importance. You can leave the real work to disentangle whether the story is true to others that can publish in lower impact topical journals.
Generally speaking I believe Science and Nature, and the role they occupy in academia, are a major problem for science. They are huge contributors to overselling and hype driven research.
I think it's not just a problem on this website; social news link previews also show the domain and favicon which might mislead people as to how high-profile the paper is.
of course, being in a high-impact journal doesn't guarantee good science at all. but it still does lend some credibility.
“Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).” [1]