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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?

> I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point.

The highest profile journals (Nature, Science, The Lancet in medicine, ...) have some tendency to go for sensationalism. They want to publish radical, ground-breaking research more than there is actual new ground-breaking results happening. So they also end up publishing mediocre research presented as ground-breaking, and some less-than-accurate research where results are exaggerated to make them look ground-breaking.

Um, yes. "Nature" used to have a great reputation. Supposedly it still does in bio. But battery articles in Nature are just awful. They keep blowing up "minor advance in surface chemistry" into "10x better battery that costs 10x less Real Soon Now".

(I'd like to see EV World or something else in that space reprint old articles as "1, 5, and 10 years ago in battery hype".)

Yeah in my field the general attitude is that Nature isn't all that great. I have heard the phrase "it was published in Nature but might still be right" more than once.

Why do you feel that, though?

My favorite counter example is "A Draft Sequence Of A Neandertal Genome". The article was accepted by both Nature and Science before it was written. The authors chose to publish in Science, because Science offered more on the side: the title page and an unlimited(!) number of "contributed" (this means unreviewed) companion papers. The article itself was about 20 pages of drivel; all the substantial content was relegated to the 200(!) pages of "Online Supplemental Material". Nobody ever read, let alone reviewed, all of that.

After that, I can't trust either Science or Nature, which offered pretty much the same crooked deal. If those two aren't "highest profile", who is?

For physics, Physical Review Letters is pretty good.

Not even those! The impact factor of a journal is a terrible guide to quality. It is more appropriately thought of as a measure of scientific sex appeal.

You must read each paper to judge its merits. Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.

I thought top ranked journals have good reviewers, since the editorial board consists of researchers/professors from top notch schools. Can you share your thoughts why junk get published in such journals? Has it to do with collusion or reputation-laundering or more?

There's an order of magnitude difference between the worst paper published in a good venue vs. the "tortured" fake papers in fake journals though.

That's a low bar, though. The point is that it's very difficult to judge the scientific merits of a paper without actually reading it. (And even then, it's easy to be fooled.)

  Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.

A lot more get published in vanity journals, so I use the impact factor as a first pass filter: I avoid papers from journals not listed the JCR¹ or those with a factor below 1.000.

I assume, maybe naively, that if an important finding were to be published in such low quality journal, it would eventually get published in a more legit publication.

1- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342623066_Journal_C...

This is an Elsevier journal. Due to a mistake by Elsevier, these papers were published without review.

University libraries who continue to pay Elsevier should know that they are propping up scammers and grifters.

For the journal in question, its "Journal Impact Factor increased from 0.471 to 1.161 over 2015–2019, that is a 146% increase over four years"

Would that be considered good?

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