Skeptics have known for years that Nature was more about fashion than science. A parody from 2019.

When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting?

It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk.

And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science.

Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth.

A new […]