ahmadove t1_iuj2lxd wrote on October 31, 2022 at 6:31 PM

Reply to comment by pentatomid_fan in Nose Picking Could Increase Risk for Alzheimer’s and Dementia by jstohler

It's common knowledge in academia. It's absolutely not a scam or predatory journal, it's even a part of the nature group lol. It's just that they decided some years ago to convert the journal to an "accept anything that is not fraud or terrible science." In academic terms, this means as long as your paper shows logical research and ethics they HAVE to publish it regardless of how meaningless or low impact it is. Because of this, the IF of the journal dropped dramatically over the last years and continues to drop as we speak.

To clarify further, I'll give an exaggerated example. If you conducted a study showing that age is a strong predictor of mortality (the older you are, the more likely you are to die), and you did all the proper statistics to show this correlation, then your paper will be published. Because, even though the conclusion is useless, it was derived scientifically and logically and so they have to publish it.

Don't get me wrong. It's a brilliant thing for science. For eons we've had the issue of academic journals only publishing high impact and flashy positive results. This is bad because all the negative results get buried in the basement of labs, and no one knows about them. Meaning others are bound to repeat the same research wasting money only to find negative results. But, on the other hand, you have people abusing this by publishing useless and not just negative results. And that is not so nice.

Edit: also I just noticed you said "pay to publish." Lol, all journals ask you to pay to publish. In fact, if one doesn't, it's probably a scam. And nature, amongst the top journals out there, takes thousands of dollars to publish.

pentatomid_fan t1_iuj5p00 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 6:51 PM

Thanks for the response, i didn't know that this journal had that reputation. I generally only pay much attention to the journals in my field (agricultural entomology). Impact factor isn't really a thing most of my colleagues think about AFAIK, as specialized fields often have low IF. Journal of Economic Entomology for example is 2.381 and Biological Control is 3.857. which is lower than Scientific Reports (4.996). but they are also some of the the main journals for the field. Maybe IF should not be the only metric to consider.

And yes, by pay-to-publish, i meant that current crop of journals that will accept anything without peer-review, but yes publishing costs money. Looks like the term I should have used is "predatory publishing".

Edit for some bad editing

ahmadove t1_iujln1y wrote on October 31, 2022 at 8:39 PM

You're absolutely right. IF is only appropriate as a metric when used to compare journals within the same field. Clinical stuff that make it to NEJM or The Lancet make the most cutting edge stuff in Nature, Cell and Science look like they're less important, then you have other smaller journals that my field publishes in like JASN and Kidney international and NDT which are even lower IF.

However sci rep has really lowered its IF even compared to other journals within the field, which in an ideal world should still be completely fine as its a negative-result journal making it inherently low impact. But unfortunately the stigma remains. Whenever you say you published there, people automatically give you a look in the life sciences. I would never bash negative results, they're vital. I do however dislike genuinely insignificant studies and especially associational studies. Correlations have importance but they're so... So overused it hurts.