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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

No direct link to the University of California press release, which is the original source for this story, and no link to the underlying journal article published in a very obscure, low-impact-factor journal. It's a bit early to be discussing this on Hacker News, methinks. Anyway, several other participants here have previously identified ScienceDaily (a press release dissemination service, nothing more) as a poor source for submissions to Hacker News.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8737181

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I must very strongly disagree with you. ScienceDaily is as good an aggregator as you'll find. Sometimes, I'll even purposely seek out their write-ups on a topic because of one thing they almost always do, while almost everyone else doesn't: make it easy to find the source paper.

I rarely ever stop to read their replicated press releases—read the press release and read the article. They're basically the same thing. ScienceDaily just regurgitates source articles; any grievance one has with the article should instead be taken with the issuing University. It's why there's such high variance in the quality of ScienceDaily articles.

They provide a link here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/uoc--dpu05121...

And provide a title: Journal Reference:

    David Schaffer et al. Systemic attenuation of the TGF-β pathway by a single drug simultaneously rejuvenates hippocampal neurogenesis and myogenesis in the same old mammal. Oncotarget, May 201

I find that an incredibly useful service since,often, even press releases can't be bothered to link to or at least, write the name of the paper under discussion.

For posterity: The paper is here- and is very readable:

http://www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/index.php?journal=o...

The pdf: http://www.impactjournals.com/oncotarget/index.php?journal=o...

Thanks for sharing the link. I see that the organization of the paper is rather odd (compared to most scientific papers I read). I would have expected the methods to be described in more detail, nearer to the beginning of the paper, and for the results section to show up after the methods section. I am beginning to get a sense of why this paper was not published in a more notable journal.

I don't think it is fair to write-off research based on the journal it was published in.

I do think it's fair to call it out, though. Articles in second or third tier journals deserve higher levels of scrutiny. I'd rather see this replicated a couple of times before acting on it.

This is spot on and holds for all scientific research.

It absolutely is. Some journals have more peer review than others, and experts in the field typically know which ones will effectively rubber stamp anything that crosses their desks. That doesn't inherently make the research wrong, but it means the usual "this was published in a peer-reviewed journal" signaling carries no weight.

Peer review is less effective then you imagine and a highly political process. These experts usually have a vested interest in a certain viewpoint or line of research. I agree extra scrutiny always helps, but scientific consensus does not guarantee truth.

It's certainly not a guarantee. However, it does tend to provide a non-zero improvement in signal-to-noise.

That process can and should be drastically improved, though.

Well,

We should also look at the article under consideration. It seems to describe a molecule that might "cure" or ameliorate the effects of aging. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence but even more, there's a big "push" to have something like this published given that in there would be a tremendous amount of money interested in investing in a project that appears to have even a one percent chance of being that big.

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