Science and Nature
When I was in grad school, we used to have a saying:
Just 'cause a paper's in Science [Nature] doesn't automatically
mean it's wrong
In all seriousness, while those two journals have published a lot of
groundbreaking work, a disproportionately large fraction of what gets
published there turns out to be crap. The reason is that these two
journals evaluate papers differently than other journals. Science and
Nature put a high premium on newsworthiness, while most other journals
do not. As a result, people trying to get their papers into Science or
Nature often "sex up" the paper's conclusions a little further than
perhaps the data warrants. And the most speculative papers are often
the most newsworthy --- but also the most often wrong. A final problem
is that the strict length limit means that many details of the
analysis must be left out (this is less true now that details can be
put into electronic supplements). This dearth of details hinders the
identification of problems by peer reviewers. Thus, I would tend to
agree with the views of the Capitol Hill staffer described in this
Prometheus post:
An interesting detail was that one staffer spoke about a
"discounting" of scientific results conditional upon in which
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