4 ms·

In my field we say "it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct". The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND prese

In my field we say "it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct". The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed matter -- removing all the important technical details -- to make it look exciting for a wider audience. For the few hundred people actually in the subfield the best course of action is often to ignore the PR piece in nature and go hunt for the technical paper with all the details that is published in parallel in a "lesser" journal. That is the one the tells what the actual progress was and what you want to consider for your own work.

lonelappde 7y ago
There's also Andrew Kelman's renaming of PPNAS, the Prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, where Prestige is used instead of Truth.
devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed I don't object to the condensed part so much. When I was a physicist, people had a similarly dim view of Nature. But Physical Review Letters also published four-page papers. And PRL was definitely a bigger prize than the long form PR(xyz) papers. Now if you happened to want to drill in and do work based on someone else's, then you would no doubt prefer the long-form. But if you are keeping up with the field, then the 4-pager is much preferred. You should be able to lay down what the actual science is in a small space. And if it's a theory paper, that space is enough to have a few equations that the reader could then puzzle out justifications for herself.
dnautics 7y ago
"it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct" We said that in biochemistry as well. Also science. There are some huge stinkers there. When arsenic life came out we were like, of course, it's horsedung, it's in science!!
Nemo_bis 7y ago
Indeed. Nature ranks very high in the retraction index. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690355/figure/F1/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690355/figure/...

lonelappde 7y ago

There's also Andrew Kelman's renaming of PPNAS, the Prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, where Prestige is used instead of Truth.

devnulloverflow 7y ago

> The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed I don't object to the condensed part so much. When I was a physicist, people had a similarly dim view of Nature. But Physical Review Letters also published four-page papers. And PRL was definitely a bigger prize than the long form PR(xyz) papers. Now if you happened to want to drill in and do work based on someone else's, then you would no doubt prefer the long-form. But if you are keeping up with the field, then the 4-pager is much preferred. You should be able to lay down what the actual science is in a small space. And if it's a theory paper, that space is enough to have a few equations that the reader could then puzzle out justifications for herself.

dnautics 7y ago

"it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct" We said that in biochemistry as well. Also science. There are some huge stinkers there. When arsenic life came out we were like, of course, it's horsedung, it's in science!!

Nemo_bis 7y ago

Indeed. Nature ranks very high in the retraction index. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690355/figure/F1/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690355/figure/...