> This such a click-bait piss-poor paper I can’t believe it’s in Cell. There's a lot of politics in what gets published in prestigious journals like Cell (also

> This such a click-bait piss-poor paper I can’t believe it’s in Cell. There's a lot of politics in what gets published in prestigious journals like Cell (also, this paper was published in Aging Cell, so not quite as prestigious). Amusing anecdote: In grad school, one of the profs in my department submitted a manuscript to Cell (this was back in the 1990s). His lab had done an amazing genetic study. There was a more famous lab at another University (run by a future Nobel prize winner) that had performed a complementary research study using an in vitro system. Both labs submitted their papers to Cell "back to back." Ben Lewin rejected the genetics manuscript (one reviewer said the genetics research belonged in a more 'archival' journal). Lewin accepted the manuscript describing the in vitro work of the more famous lab. A few months later, the anonymous reviewer was visiting our department (to give a talk) and he revealed himself as the reviewer to the professor who had submitted the manuscript. Professor asks, "I was honestly shocked by the review. <famous lab's manuscript> was just dotting the Is and crossing the Ts of our research." Reviewer responded with, "I thought [rejecting your manuscript was] what Ben wanted me to do." Probably did not help that the reviewer had been a post-doc in the famous prof's lab. That's just one story that I am pretty familiar with. I have heard many others (e.g., famous prof telling editors stuff like "<shitty> paper gets accepted or we will submit our next groundbreaking paper elsewhere."