September 30, 2021

Nature Total Landscaping

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Academic journals keep expanding, especially with the growth of open-access journals. Some publishers have reacted to this by creating a bunch of new journals. A few of these publishers give all the journals related names. Nature has Nature Genetics and Nature Communications and Nature Scientific Reports. The BMJ has BMJ Open and BMJ Nutrition, Prevention and Healthcare. The Lancet has The Lancet Public Health and The Lancet Regional Health — Western Pacific and others.

These journals are not the same as the parent journal.  You might or might not think a paper published in Nature was especially reliable because it’s hard to publish in Nature; that’s much less true for Nature Scientific Reports. You might comment that research has been published “in prestigious medical journal The Lancet“, but that’s misleading if it was actually published in The Lancet Regional Health — Western Pacific. I think the importance of journal rankings is vastly overrated, but if you’re going to rely on it you need to get it right.

Back in November, the Trump Campaign held a famous press conference that was not exactly at the Four Seasons hotel.  The label Nature Total Landscaping for these additional journals is a bit unfair — Four Seasons Total Landscaping isn’t even trying to be in the posh hotel business — but it was irresistible to science social media.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    There was also the academic journalism review from a Missouri University based in Colombia Mo. Some times confused with the Colombia University in NYC.
    My pet peeve was the letters or commentary published in many journals which wasnt peer reviewed but later ‘up-cycled’ in references.

    3 years ago