[nonbel]

It depresses me that people get so easily excited without checking what is going on. This will only encourage more sloppy research and vague reporting on said research in the future, slowing down actual progress.

See my post in this thread about how they admit not being properly blinded, and also decided in some unspecified way when a mouse was "moribund" at which point the mouse was killed. The former is maybe ok (shit happens), but the lack of details regarding "moribund" are unacceptable. For that info to be missing, we can deduce this paper was not approved by a honest/competent group of reviewers.

[purplerabbit]

Um, in case you didn't know, Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence...

And it's sort of mean to say that my naive response to this SENS stuff is "slowing down actual progress."

[hannob]

> Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence...

Maybe the first, certainly not the second.

There's an unfortunate correlation between sloppy science and popular journals that's been shown again and again. Nature is one of the journals with the highest rates of retractions[1]. Thinking "it's been published in Nature, it must be good science" is certainly not reasonable in any way.

[1] http://iai.asm.org/content/79/10/3855/F1.expansion.html

[purplerabbit]

You've convinced me... thank you for using evidence to back your argument

[nonbel]

>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence..."

What does that have to do with the quality of this paper?

>'And it's sort of mean to say that my naive response to this SENS stuff is "slowing down actual progress."'

Sorry for that, it is not really your fault, rather the fault of those involved in the publication of this paper. But don't shoot the messenger, it is also not my fault this study was apparently poorly peer reviewed yet got a bunch of press coverage. I just wish people were doing their jobs and acting with proper skepticism because I want medical research to be successful.

[purplerabbit]

"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth. Which is relevant.

[nonbel]

>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth.

It would be nice if this were true and we could have a easy to use heuristic. But, as pointed out by others, the evidence seems to point to either no, or even an inverse, relationship between journal prestige/respect and the quality of peer review and journal articles.

[refurb]

Peer review is notoriously poor, even in the most respected journals.

[anonaoeu]

Especially in the most respected journals.