[xamuel]

This obsession with journal impact factor is toxic in academia. It's what allows parasitic publishing companies to continue to extract rents despite contributing nothing to science for decades. The majority of papers are envelope-pushers, churned out in enormous numbers because of "publish or perish". Academics who need CV bullet-points are going to churn out quick papers that go with the status-quo, with bibliographies filled with papers that do likewise. So of course journals that push the status-quo are going to have high impact factors. Back when surgeons were laughing at the crackpot telling them to wash their hands, a paper on the unnecessity of hand-washing would be well-cited.

[aluren]

While I agree there are plenty of issues in academia among which too much emphasis on IF is certainly a thing, it does provide a helpful filter (or prior, if you will) to quickly assess whether some material is worth your time. In this case, stuff in low-IF journals that are virtually unknown in the community (e.g. there are a few journals like Bioinformatics that are also fairly low-IF but very well respected), whose conclusions can't help but provide ammunition for a political point, all accompanied with commenters hinting that there's some grand omerta in the community (lol, as if we didn't already have problems pushing the obvious stuff like climate change first), all of that adds up to something rather suspicious.

Please don't regurgitate common talking points about academia issues if you're just trying to score points in support of a fringe political position, that's not at all the direction we (as scientists that are critical of academia) want to go.

[xamuel]

I'm not trying to score points in favor of a political position (please follow HN etiquette of giving posters the benefit of the doubt).

The filtering you refer to may be useful[1] when looking at bulk lists of papers (e.g. when sitting on a hiring committee), but this is an example where the article has already been curated for our attention, namely: by being upvoted on Hacker News. You can still choose to filter it out, but it's silly to write comments attacking the paper based on the journal's impact factor. Better to grapple with the paper's actual scientific content.

[1] (Useful in the same tragedy-of-the-commons way that it's "useful" to leave a picnic ground without cleaning up after yourself.)

[aluren]

Alright, I wasn't talking about you specifically, sorry if you took it that way.

On HN curation: while I certainly look up to this community when it comes to coding, technology and latest new software tools in general, I'm sorry to say the standards are not even remotely up to par when it comes to genomics. I assume it's because neither the mod team nor the majority of the community has a relevant background, and it's perfectly understandable. It does mean however that I, more often than not, encounter some pretty egregious stuff on here, especially when some dreaded words like "evolution" or "heritability" get mentioned. I sometimes try to chime in (and keep in mind I'm no authority beyond being a rando who happens to work in the field and knows plenty of people more qualified than me) but sometimes the disconnect between HN discussions and actual scientific community discussions is unreal.

On the paper itself: I didn't only mention its IF and voiced other concerns further in the thread. Ultimately there's a limited amount of time one may allocate to reading papers when there are literally millions of the damn things.

[_liww]

[flagged]

[dang]

Hey, would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? It's quite against the spirit of the site and its rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The idea here is to exchange information thoughtfully and to treat others kindly even when they are ignorant or wrong. If you know more, share some of what you know in a way that the rest of us can learn from. Don't post comments to put others down or bash their views.

We don't have these rules for ethical reasons or because we think it's good to be wrong. It's just that we want this place to stay interesting, and when internet users flame each other, that destroys the forum and causes smart people to leave. We want to avoid that scorched-earth outcome.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

I don't get the point.

If science does care about the JOURNAL impact factors too much, why then, as a consequence, would everyone publish in low impact factor journals?

[aluren]

Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition. You first try to publish in a high-IF journal, if they reject you then you try one with lower IF, and so on. I'm all about not taking IF as face value and don't need a n-th reminder about the metric's issues seeing how rehashing them is something of a favorite pastime among scientists, but in this specific case other more qualitative assessments don't line up either:

-Journal is completely obscure to the genomics community

-No causal genetic mechanism is shown, everything is shoved into a "heritability" black box that some people seem to think is like your video game character starting stats or something

-Authors don't have a genetics background

-It's not my field, but there appears to be a wealth of literature on how fertility rates decrease in history, none of them involving "heritability" and little is done to address, reconcile or unify that

-There does seem to be darker political overtones that are exacerbated by commenters, leading me to think the arguments are not being made in good faith

Journal IF is just a (flawed) heuristic but in this case it sets a low prior and the "updates" didn't help

[xamuel]

>There does seem to be darker political overtones that are exacerbated by commenters

Are we reading the same comments section? Which specific comments are you talking about? The comments section I read seemed quite apolitical, except for this particular sub-thread.

>Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition.

It might be true that Low-IF journals in general are easier to publish to, but that's not true "by definition". By definition, Low-IF journals are journals whose papers are less-cited (this is an oversimplification, of course). For example, IF tends to vary a lot by field, so in your comment where you casually dismissed anything with IF<4 as a joke, you inadvertently dismissed whole entire fields. For example, one of the absolute top math journals, the "Annals of Mathematics", has an IF of 3.027. I can assure you, it's much harder to publish in the Annals of Mathematics than in a typical genetics journal with an IF of >=4.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

>> There does seem to be darker political overtones that are exacerbated by commenters

> Are we reading the same comments section? Which specific comments are you talking about? The comments section I read seemed quite apolitical, except for this particular sub-thread.

Please.

>> Low-IF journals are easier to publish to by definition.

> (...) By definition, Low-IF journals are journals whose papers are less-cited (this is an oversimplification, of course). For example, IF tends to vary a lot by field, so in your comment where you casually dismissed anything with IF<4 as a joke, you inadvertently dismissed whole entire fields. (...)

Accepted. So in this specific case, do we talk about a journal in a field where an IF of 4 is low or high?

[xamuel]

>Please.

No, you please. I'm genuinely trying to reach a better understanding of your side. What comment did you think was the most political, outside of this sub-thread? Was it the one by car12 [1] which pointed out a quantitative observation about Muslim fertility rates and imagined a future where Islamic parties gain a bigger voice in politics through demographics? If so, what is it about that that's so political? Or if not that, then can you point to another comment that you think was particularly political?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361236

[j_wtf_all_taken]

Thank you, really good example for that.

This is also a good one:

> If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover.

> If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective.

Without any further detail or reasoning, just by "thinking about it" (whatever the author meant by that, he did not elaborate), the author draws a pretty extreme conclusion. This seems to be a rather unscientific, political attempt to reply to the original question:

> If this is true, then how do they explain population stabilization in, e.g., Europe, and other developed areas? Why shouldn't what worked for Europe work for the rest of the world?

[_liww]

Please explain why estimates of the twin & SNP heritability of age at first birth are wrong

[j_wtf_all_taken]

I don't really understand how that is relevant for the discussion in this thread.

[_liww]

If anyone thinks the paper is wrong, they are stating that the measures of those values are wrong. The rest is inevitable.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

I do not really understand what you mean with "The rest is inevitable", for example I do not know what exactly you mean with "the rest".