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I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published the

I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published there, I was very unimpressed with the quality of the refereeing and editing. Certainly doesn't mean the work is wrong, but laymen shouldn't interpret this as having the same sort of seal of approval as a normal Nature article. In my field (physics), Scientific Reports is held in similar esteem to a run-of-the-mill specialized journal, with the added worry that the editors are not sufficiently specialized to give the paper a hard look.

wflynny 10y ago
Having reviewed several papers for Scientific Reports in the past year, it was very similar to my experience reviewing for PLoS One. You are mandated not to factor in the significance of the work and only to critique the methodology and conclusions [1]. My experience reading articles there ranges from complete junk to papers that probably just missed the mark of getting into Nature proper. Articles should make it more clear the distinction between Nature Publishing Group, Nature (journal), and Scientific Reports (open access journal). Confusion then propagates to the headlines of the articles when posted to content aggregators, take /r/science and it's related subreddits for example. [1]: http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteria http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteri...
- jamessb 10y ago
  It is particular confusing that articles in Scientific Reports have URLs of the form http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> This means that on the HN (or Reddit) front-page they are listed simply as "(nature.com)", so it isn't immediately obvious which journal they're in. I'm not sure whether this is what you meant by confusion propogating, so thought I would explicitly state this.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Here, it is hard to see how the potential significance of the work would be in question if the methodology and conclusions are reasonably sound as publication implies based on your comment.
ylem 10y ago
I've published in Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Materials, Scientific Reports, etc. also in physics. Perhaps my impression is wrong, but Scientific Reports does have editors in different subfields and I didn't find the refereeing level to be that different from a more specialized journal such as Physical Review Letters or Physical Review B. The main criteria is that the result simply has to be technically correct as compared to "impactful". I think that there's definitely a reason to have a peer reviewed place to publish articles about findings that are correct, but not as exciting as we might have hoped. I think of it as community service...
ylem 10y ago
One other thought comes to mind--the submission pattern of different subfields of science vary tremendously. There are also questions of expediency--for example, perhaps a student was graduating and they decided that the work would be published quickly in scientific reports, or perhaps another group was rumored to be publishing soon. It's impossible to say. If it were my field, I would just read the paper myself to see if it were technically sound instead of stressing too much about the fact that it's a scientific report. If it wasn't my field, I would check to see how cited it was in the future...

wflynny 10y ago

Having reviewed several papers for Scientific Reports in the past year, it was very similar to my experience reviewing for PLoS One. You are mandated not to factor in the significance of the work and only to critique the methodology and conclusions [1]. My experience reading articles there ranges from complete junk to papers that probably just missed the mark of getting into Nature proper. Articles should make it more clear the distinction between Nature Publishing Group, Nature (journal), and Scientific Reports (open access journal). Confusion then propagates to the headlines of the articles when posted to content aggregators, take /r/science and it's related subreddits for example. [1]: http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteria http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteri...

jamessb 10y ago
It is particular confusing that articles in Scientific Reports have URLs of the form http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> http://www.nature.com/articles/srep<id> This means that on the HN (or Reddit) front-page they are listed simply as "(nature.com)", so it isn't immediately obvious which journal they're in. I'm not sure whether this is what you meant by confusion propogating, so thought I would explicitly state this.
brudgers 10y ago
Here, it is hard to see how the potential significance of the work would be in question if the methodology and conclusions are reasonably sound as publication implies based on your comment.

ylem 10y ago

I've published in Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Materials, Scientific Reports, etc. also in physics. Perhaps my impression is wrong, but Scientific Reports does have editors in different subfields and I didn't find the refereeing level to be that different from a more specialized journal such as Physical Review Letters or Physical Review B. The main criteria is that the result simply has to be technically correct as compared to "impactful". I think that there's definitely a reason to have a peer reviewed place to publish articles about findings that are correct, but not as exciting as we might have hoped. I think of it as community service...

ylem 10y ago

One other thought comes to mind--the submission pattern of different subfields of science vary tremendously. There are also questions of expediency--for example, perhaps a student was graduating and they decided that the work would be published quickly in scientific reports, or perhaps another group was rumored to be publishing soon. It's impossible to say. If it were my field, I would just read the paper myself to see if it were technically sound instead of stressing too much about the fact that it's a scientific report. If it wasn't my field, I would check to see how cited it was in the future...