Maggie's Farm

Judith Curry’s words “By publishing this, Nature seems to be looking for headlines, rather than promoting good science” seem to ring loud and true in light of further observation-based research.

I don't know about the "instead of good science" part, but every researcher knows---and Nature's editors freely admit---that the magazine looks for articles that pack a punch. It's no secret they seek headlines. They measure their success as a publication by the "impact" their articles have on the field. And how do they measure 'impact"? By the number of citations, of course. In the very short term (but probably not the long term), whether an article is right or wrong is irrelevant to citation counts. Bad papers can receive as many citations as a good one, possibly even more, as later researchers try to disprove earlier results they consider to be incorrect. There's nothing like a good academic fist fight to pump up an article's citations in the literature. If the editors and peer reviewers do their jobs, this system works like Brownian motion, and the science is self-correcting. That's what will happen in this case, with two conflicting papers being submitted just months apart to two different journals and being reviewed, I presume, by different referees. For the first group of authors, perhaps their best response should just be a very public, "Whoops. Our bad."