It's kinda like phrenology but worse
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
One annoyance I've had with this whole discussion are all of the people saying it was published in Nature. This article even makes that mistake which I think is pretty egregious given that it looks like an academic website and the authors should know better.
The article was not published in Nature. It was published in Nature Communication. This may sound like a nitpick to an outsider but is a world of difference. Nature's impact factor is 42 versus Nature Communication's which is 12 and is wildly less selective than Nature proper. They are two completely different journals and the only similarity is ownership and a word in their name.
Edit: I just saw all of the comments on the article itself noting this. Glad I'm not the only one.
It's not a coincidental word. Nature was chosen from Nature.
https://www.nature.com/nature-research/about/journal-metrics (npj is Nature Partner Journals)
Star Trek: Lower Decks doesn't just share two words with Star Trek.
Did you also note the author's take on that?
>If the journal were published by nature.com but just called Communications, I’d agree with you. But they put Nature right in the name. In the GM example, it would be as if Chevys were named Cadillac Chevys. If GM made Cadillacs and Cadillac Chevys, and I bought a Cadillac Chevy which had a rattling engine and wasn’t powerful enough to climb a hill, then, yeah, I’d be ok saying, “My new Cadillac couldn’t climb the hill.” And then if someone said, “Don’t call it a Cadillac; call it a Cadillac Chevy, man,” I’d reply: “GM made the decision to give that car the Cadillac name, not me.”
>Similarly, nature.com made the decision to give this journal the Nature name. If they wanted to avoid confusion, they easily could’ve done so. But my guess is that a big reason they chose this name was to play both sides of the street: the journal gets the Nature name so that authors are motivated to publish there, as the word Nature looks good on the C.V. etc., but then they have plausible deniability when they publish something bad, as it’s not “really” Nature. I don’t want to give them this deniability.
>In short, I’m calling it Nature because it’s the name of the journal, not because it’s the name of the publisher.
>Just by analogy: the American Statistical Association (ASA) publishes many journals. The flagship is the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA). Then they publish other journals. The other journals have different names. The American Statistician is not called JASA Teaching. Statistics and Public Policy is not called JASA Policy. Etc. That’s fair enough. When I publish in those lesser journals, my papers don’t get that JASA sheen. And JASA doesn’t get tarnished by bad papers published in those lesser journals.
I agree that it is quite confusing and probably intentionally so to take advantage of Nature's prestigious name. That still doesn't make them the same journal.
They can't have it both ways. If being a journal parallel to and under the same org as the journal Nature is supposed to make Nature Communications look better, then low-quality content in Nature Communications necessarily erodes the Nature brand of which they are a very deliberate part.
Again, Andrew Gelman put it succinctly:
> The paper is published at nature.com. Nature Communications is an extension of the Nature brand. Reputational inference goes both ways. By giving this journal the Nature name, they’re leveraging the Nature brand. The converse is that if the new journal published a paper with serious flaws, the Nature brand loses.
I've published in Nature Photonics for instance and if I listed it as a Nature paper on my CV then I would be lying. Any potential employer would also see that as an intentional misrepresentation (given how prestigious Nature is and how "normal" Nature Photonics is) and end the hiring process right there.
It's annoying that they took the name, but they are still literally two different journals. Saying that this questionable paper was published in the super prestigious journal Nature which is well known for desk rejecting most manuscripts is misleading and incorrect. It was really published in a much more commonplace journal.
It's important because I would be hugely surprised if it was accepted into Nature (and would be a much bigger story). Not so much for Nature Communications.
Whether or not Nature is tarnishing its name with these offshoots is a different story completely, but it is still true and an important distinction that the article was not published in Nature proper. It's to the point where I think most practicing scientists would know to look for whether it was Nature Nature (as one of our lab techs says) or some other derivative.
Then they can say that themselves.
> Let me emphasize what I wrote above, that I think this could be a fine research project if conducted in an exploratory spirit and not over-sold. When I say it’s “worse than phrenology,” I’m speaking of the science; I’m not making any moral or societal claims.
But in this case it is more like palm reading disguised in scientific terms, there is no science there.