Why I No Longer Engage with Nature Publishing Group

I don't think I agree with the basic thrust of this post, as I do think that there is a necessity to recognize the role of privilege in scientific bias and to adjust through inclusivity.

However, I do agree with its conclusions: Nature seems to have been broken in this past decade, and a reader can no longer count on scientific rigor being its bedrock. In fact, some pieces that make it through to publication are wholly incorrect in an empirical sense, and since Nature covers such a wide array of topics and approaches, it is impossible to know which unless you happen to be reading an article in an area of frequent and recent domain study.

As was discussed extensively here on HN when it happened, Nature seems to have (justly, I think) lost a whole lot of credibility due to its bizarre and difficult-to-follow publication policies during the COVID19 pandemic, culminating with the unusually boorish headline, "Face masks for COVID pass their largest test yet" in response to a study which decidedly showed no such thing, and which in part prompted the publication of a re-assessment which comes to the opposite conclusion [0].

Most epidemiologists I know - including those who continued to hold out hope for mask efficacy through this time - quietly found this article to be below the standards for a serious scientific publication.

Just re-reading - I'm glad I can laugh about this now - I had forgotten that, even though the article acknowledges that "cloth makes fall short" (whatever that means), it also says "The study linked surgical masks with an 11% drop in risk, compared with a 5% drop for cloth", __without mentioning that the latter was not statistically significant__. I don't recall ever seeing such a thing in Nature prior to COVID19.

It was surreal at times to see the stark difference between, for example, BMJ, whose tone and timbre remained much more consistent, and Nature, which seemed to become an entirely new and different publication.

0: https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...