7 ms·

This is not a high profile paper. The accompanying domain to this post is (unintentionally) misleading: the actual journal that this paper is published in is ’S

This is not a high profile paper. The accompanying domain to this post is (unintentionally) misleading: the actual journal that this paper is published in is ’Science Advances’, not ’Science’ (the prestigious one). I thought there was something funny about the abstract...most abstracts in high profile journals have a much different tone.

rrmm 6y ago
Good catch. Advances I gather is their open-access journal? Not necessarily any worse I would think, but yeah not for the big impact papers.
- avancemos 6y ago
  It’s a solid journal to be fair (impact factor around 12, whereas Science is 40-something).
nabla9 6y ago
Both 'Science' and 'Nature' have prestige, but people get confused because same domains are used for multiple journals. Open access journals like Advances or Nature Communications are not that bad, but Nature Scientific Reports is horrible. It's very low impact journal with minimum review. It's intended to be place for grey literature where technical reports and scientific reports with no importance go. Unfortunately it has started to publish junk science too. Those pieces get posted into HN frequently. All that happens under nature.com that makes them seem legit.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  This is not entirely true. It has a low impact, but is still reasonable. Nature Scientific Reports is still published by nature and does peer review. Granted the content is not on the level of nature itself. And junk science? Please provide links.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    Crap, Courtesy of a Major Scientific Publisher https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/10/crap-courtesy-of-a-major-scientific-publisher https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/10/cr... More on Scientific Reports, And on Faked Papers https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mo... They are supposed to do very light peer review just trying to check if the article is technically sound. Apparently even that review process is broken.
    - TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
      Thanks for the links
    - Certhas 6y ago
      Technical soundness is not light peer review. It's the core of peer review. Everything else is editorializing and selling "importance". As a matter of fact you can get plenty of crap into the higher tier Science/Nature journals if you just tell a good enough story about importance. You can leave the real work to disentangle whether the story is true to others that can publish in lower impact topical journals. Generally speaking I believe Science and Nature, and the role they occupy in academia, are a major problem for science. They are huge contributors to overselling and hype driven research.
baq 6y ago
I'd say it's high time scientist in climate science changed their tone. Might as well start with abstracts.
sradman 6y ago
The underlying dataset is fascinating and supports the UV-B damage hypothesis while also falsifying the mega-volcano hypothesis. It took a great deal of Wikipedia research for me to get a feel for the paleo geography and paleo climate of East Greenland 359 Mya. The “warming causes ozone collapse” meme seems aimed at gaining media attention but that tactic seems to be the norm now in scientific papers. Sometimes the curation role of a journal is important and peer review can identify errors. In this case it seems like access to the right geological formations by competent scientists is key and I read nothing in the paper made me question the science. I don’t think the lack of journal prestige diminishes the significance of this specific paper; it probably reflects the modern relevance of this extinction event.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
frozenport 6y ago
Hey! Science Advances has an Impact Factor over 12. Publishing in this journal is a career making milestone. Our university prepares a press release for anything over 10ish. To get into Science proper you need resources that almost nobody has, including years video editing experience and dedicated staff to produce the rotoscoped videos Eric Betzig shows.
currymj 6y ago
This domain name issue also comes up with PubMed, which uses the nih.gov domain, making people think it's actually endorsed by NIH. I think it's not just a problem on this website; social news link previews also show the domain and favicon which might mislead people as to how high-profile the paper is. of course, being in a high-impact journal doesn't guarantee good science at all. but it still does lend some credibility.
- jhayward 6y ago
  PubMed looks pretty much like an official publication of the NIH to me: “Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).” [1] [1] https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed.html https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed.html
  - currymj 6y ago
    the website itself is, but it aggregates journal articles which are not. there are a lot of academic journals with very low standards for peer review, but PubMed doesn't make any editorial choices.

rrmm 6y ago

Good catch. Advances I gather is their open-access journal? Not necessarily any worse I would think, but yeah not for the big impact papers.

avancemos 6y ago
It’s a solid journal to be fair (impact factor around 12, whereas Science is 40-something).

nabla9 6y ago

Both 'Science' and 'Nature' have prestige, but people get confused because same domains are used for multiple journals. Open access journals like Advances or Nature Communications are not that bad, but Nature Scientific Reports is horrible. It's very low impact journal with minimum review. It's intended to be place for grey literature where technical reports and scientific reports with no importance go. Unfortunately it has started to publish junk science too. Those pieces get posted into HN frequently. All that happens under nature.com that makes them seem legit.

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
This is not entirely true. It has a low impact, but is still reasonable. Nature Scientific Reports is still published by nature and does peer review. Granted the content is not on the level of nature itself. And junk science? Please provide links.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Crap, Courtesy of a Major Scientific Publisher https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/10/crap-courtesy-of-a-major-scientific-publisher https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/10/cr... More on Scientific Reports, And on Faked Papers https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mo... They are supposed to do very light peer review just trying to check if the article is technically sound. Apparently even that review process is broken.
  - TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
    Thanks for the links
  - Certhas 6y ago
    Technical soundness is not light peer review. It's the core of peer review. Everything else is editorializing and selling "importance". As a matter of fact you can get plenty of crap into the higher tier Science/Nature journals if you just tell a good enough story about importance. You can leave the real work to disentangle whether the story is true to others that can publish in lower impact topical journals. Generally speaking I believe Science and Nature, and the role they occupy in academia, are a major problem for science. They are huge contributors to overselling and hype driven research.

baq 6y ago

I'd say it's high time scientist in climate science changed their tone. Might as well start with abstracts.

sradman 6y ago

The underlying dataset is fascinating and supports the UV-B damage hypothesis while also falsifying the mega-volcano hypothesis. It took a great deal of Wikipedia research for me to get a feel for the paleo geography and paleo climate of East Greenland 359 Mya. The “warming causes ozone collapse” meme seems aimed at gaining media attention but that tactic seems to be the norm now in scientific papers. Sometimes the curation role of a journal is important and peer review can identify errors. In this case it seems like access to the right geological formations by competent scientists is key and I read nothing in the paper made me question the science. I don’t think the lack of journal prestige diminishes the significance of this specific paper; it probably reflects the modern relevance of this extinction event.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

frozenport 6y ago

Hey! Science Advances has an Impact Factor over 12. Publishing in this journal is a career making milestone. Our university prepares a press release for anything over 10ish. To get into Science proper you need resources that almost nobody has, including years video editing experience and dedicated staff to produce the rotoscoped videos Eric Betzig shows.

currymj 6y ago

This domain name issue also comes up with PubMed, which uses the nih.gov domain, making people think it's actually endorsed by NIH. I think it's not just a problem on this website; social news link previews also show the domain and favicon which might mislead people as to how high-profile the paper is. of course, being in a high-impact journal doesn't guarantee good science at all. but it still does lend some credibility.

jhayward 6y ago
PubMed looks pretty much like an official publication of the NIH to me: “Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).” [1] [1] https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed.html https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed.html
- currymj 6y ago
  the website itself is, but it aggregates journal articles which are not. there are a lot of academic journals with very low standards for peer review, but PubMed doesn't make any editorial choices.