I understand the philosophy of science just fine. The problem with Nature articles is not that they are mostly right but a little bit wrong around the edges in ways other scientists will soon refine. The problem is they are often no better than science fiction. They are wrong, wrong at their core, the authors and editors know they are wrong and nobody cares because the conclusions are ideologically useful. It's not specific to Nature of course. Science as a whole has a massive problem with such papers. Way too many researchers/academics like to blow this problem off as just the normal scientific process - it's not.
Here's how I explain it: Science and Nature play a role different from other journals. Their role is to stimulate new thoughts amongst the most skilled in the field. Any really good scientist in a field can read a paper published by another really good scientist and hone away the bullshit, but be inspired by the ideas. People who are not skilled in the art of reading a competitive paper are going to be disappointed by the sloppy lab work, sloppy writing, sloppy thinking, because it appears that the overall benefit of disseminating new ideas widely for experts to cogitate on may exceed the value from having "perfectly correct" papers.
Case in point: the original DNA structure paper (W&C, 1953) actually had a wrong detailed structure for the DNA (but the right conclusion about how the structure provided a hypothesis for a templating mechanism) because the alcohol concentration used to form the crystal was too high. The value of getting the paper out the community ASAP greatly exceeded the small details that were wrong (which eventually got resolved), because it stimulated the thought of the community around the templating mechanism.
I gave up on Science decades ago. I started reading more Nature instead thinking it might be better, but I've given up on it now, too. Some folks who have read Nature for far longer than I did will tell you that it has always been problematic, even more so than Science. I fail to understand why either of these publications is held in particularly high regard.
I guess it's good to have some mundane article in Nature.
Because otherwise Nature mostly attracts high profile papers, that means that articles in Nature are more likely to be wrong than articles in other journals. (Interesting findings are more likely to be wrong.)
Often, I'll read a science article in a blog, or local newspaper, or general-interest magazine. I'll see something obviously incorrect, and say "well, it's not a science outlet, they can't be expected to know the science that well, and they're just explaining it to lay people anyway, so it's good enough. I'll double check this with a reliable science news source."
But you'd think if anyone could get it right, and trust their readers to care about them getting it right, it would be Nature! If Nature is going to start going to lower their standards to go after clicks, I dunno what reliable source I'm supposed to double check things with.
There are many well documented cases showing that both Nature and Science are particularly susceptible to these types of shenanigans. I don't know if this is unique to them because of their particular competitive spirit, or if distaste in examination extends to most journals and it's just that Nature and Science see far more scrutiny than other journals.
These high profile journals serve the purpose of publicizing discoveries that are thought to have far-reaching interest in science. However, at the same time, they have the strictest limitations on publications, meaning that the methods section, the foundation of science, are rarely described in any detail. So they have some of the worst practices for publication while supposedly chronicling the most important discoveries.
So while Nature/Science papers make the news and make people's careers, it's important to downweight the certainty of the finding until there is independent verification.
> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"
Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field. Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit, Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their status as the place to go for big results, but this also means they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational research for publication. That doesn't mean that research published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).
That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all criticism of Nature is entirely fair.
Science/Nature are prestigious, but the quality of their articles are often questionable. Part of the problem is the short format, which makes it difficult to include a lot of context and sanity-checking. Another issue is that they prioritize the “sexiness” of the research over pretty much everything else.
This really is a depressingly true sentiment. Nature is both the most important publication but so often, the big shots publish overhyped stuff there that doesn't deserve it but get away with it since they are bigshots. Underscore here for another piece of evidence of the dysfunction in science.
Nature isn't clickbait, but it is not the best journal when it comes to accurately reporting the truth. As we used to joke in grad school, Nature was a great journal to publish the hottest incorrect results, or to write op-eds that influenced old scientists in England.
At the same time I find the incredible enthusiasm and desire to extrapolate the simplest reports into powerful narratives (as a subset of HN people discussing LK-99 do) very depressing. I guess everybody has to go through t heir own Pons and Fleischman or Jessie Gelsinger moments before they understand just how much hype there is in next-gen science.
Sadly, Nature has been doing this for years in their articles. Nature articles (not papers) are "popular science for scientists", and as such often use hyperbole and sensationalism and fail to communicate the actual core science. It's sad that the most-sought out journal does this :|
Nature is a mainstream science publication which aims for a wide audience, so relatively speaking, it is definitely more sensationalist when compared to the top journals in the respective fields.
Not to disagree with your point. Just that Nature is not a good example to illustrate it.
Yeah, these articles are often pretty poor. People seem to love treating 'Science' as this magical all-knowing entity which we must bow to and never question, when we should treat it as the exact opposite in order to learn and solidify our understanding of reality.
All fair points. I don’t mean to absolve academic science at all, there is a credibility problem, completely independent of reporting. I’m mostly saying that when it comes to reporting and blame for bad reporting, this is an issue of degree, and science reporting mucks things up far, far more often than scientists do, enough so that looking for blame outside of reporting seems pointless. Bad reporting and bad science are two separate problems, and the article we are commenting on says it’s about about bad reporting.
I’m not very familiar with exaggerated claims in Nature, can you provide some examples? My experience with science reporting is almost always one of looking up the primary source and finding far more nuanced claims than were reported.
Nature is a world leading journal with a very rigorous review process. They publish less than a tenth of the (proper) submissions they get. So the science here is likely to have high quality.
As for the Guardian article, there are some pretty heavy direct quotes in there, in case you don't trust the journalist's assessment (I don't see any strong reason why you wouldn't).
The article implicitly assumes that a scientific determination of the truth has been made. (Which is problematic in itself. Bad science gets published all the time.)
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