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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

> They're from a major peer-reviewed study published in Nature, the highest-impact journal.

No, the domain name is nature.com because it's in a Nature Publishing Group journal, Scientific Reports, which is their least prestigious journal.

It's a common mistake, and they do that on purpose, of course, to leverage the Nature brand.

It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.

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> It's also a mistake that implies a complete lack of familiarity with scientific publishing, unfortunately, which makes it a bit difficult to take your judgements regarding plausibility very seriously.

It's still peer reviewed, and as the sibling comment said, more applicable to this type of research. Also you now went from raising understandable objections to refusing the argument because it comes from a specific journal, which doesn't sound very scientific to me

You're right it isn't fair to reject someone's scientific argument just because they seem unfamiliar with how professional science works.

We shouldn't have believed the study more if it actually had been in Nature.

I don't think that's what I was saying, though.

The issue in this thread was about taking a step back and looking at the overall plausibility of the conclusions, taking together multiple studies.

I agree with the GP that the argument doesn't really pass the smell test.

That's still the main issue, and it is something that people who don't understand scientific publishing struggle understanding/doing, because they lack the intuition for how certain results came about.

It’s less prestigious because it doesn’t judge papers on novelty, only on technical accuracy. For incremental research like this, it is an appropriate choice. The lower prestige has no bearing on the accuracy of their findings.

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