Tag: Nature Scientific Reports

• AI slop clears peer-review

  Here’s an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5:

  

  This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors. Then again how the image made its way past the editors is also a mystery.

  Nature Scientific Reports has had several problems before, enumerated on its Wikipedia page. It’s a ‘megajournal’ in the vein of PLOS One and follows the gold OA model, with an article processing charge of “£2190.00/$2690.00/€2390.00”.

  2025.12.06

• On that anti-mRNA vaccines video

  The Times of India has published an irresponsible article today on a video by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claiming with dubious evidence that all mRNA vaccines are harmful. The article quotes from the video at length, effectively offering less-sceptical readers a transcript and encouraging the uncritical absorption of the video’s contents.

  Irrespective of the quality of data that is available vis-à-vis the adverse effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the Times of India article is an offence to good sense, responsible journalism and public healthcare. It amounts to a major news outlet misusing its status to normalise the low quality of arguments and discussion surrounding the public discussion on COVID-19 vaccines.

  1. The headline is “Coronavirus vaccine: MIT Professor calls for immediate suspension of COVID mRNA vaccine”. It doesn’t say that the individual, Retsef Levi, is a professor of operations management at the Sloan School of Management, giving rise to the ad verecundiam fallacy. Expertise is not the (partial) name of the institute where a person is employed, the prefixes or suffixes to their name, or even their claims. Expertise is exactly what they have received specialised training to do and/or have been doing at a professional level for a long time. Times of India should have included Prof. Levi’s actual expertise in the headline – although I may be asking for too much here because it appears as though the author was aware of it but didn’t think it mattered. That Prof. Levi works at MIT also appears to have impressed the author, and may well have prompted the article in its current form.

  2. The article neither facilitates nor encourages independent verification of Prof. Levi’s claims. Even if – and that’s a big if – Prof. Levi’s claims hold up, allowing readers to check for themselves the claims an article is platforming is an important expression of trust and, in a manner of speaking, the right thing to do when one is participating in a discourse of reason and facts. But the article doesn’t contain any links to the papers that Prof. Levi invokes in his defence. The only ‘independent’ expert it has chosen to quote is Aseem Malhotra, the British cardiologist who has made controversial claims about warding off COVID-19 with a diet he devised and who has become known for opposing the use of the mRNA vaccines.

  (By the way, this isn’t whataboutery per se: that a scientist has made other dubious claims shouldn’t mean that they’re current claim should be dubious as well – nor that their legitimate and brave championing of one cause means that all their causes are legitimate. As a journalist, I’d be wary of the extent to which their willingness to swim against the current has benumbed their ability to recognise and respond to valid criticism.)

  3. The article neglects to mention the potential dangers of allowing people to interpret the findings of their own studies. For example, google “Retsef Levi” and one of the top five results is a link to his Google Scholar profile. Click on it, and on the landing page, sort Prof. Levi’s papers by year (instead of by number of citations). The ninth article should be a paper published by Scientific Reports – a Nature journal – and coauthored by Prof. Lefi, Christopher Sun, and Eli Jaffe. The numbers and names you must have seen in the course of this clickthrough should tell you three things:

  a) A note atop the paper’s page, dated May 2022, says the journal’s editors are reviewing criticisms that the paper’s conclusions are problematic.;

  b) Scientific Reports is a peer-reviewed journal, but peer-review didn’t prevent it from publishing this paper (and then flagging problems about it, rather than before it enters the scientific literature). This is because peer-review has several limitations.;

  c) According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 19 times – but it doesn’t say anything about the contexts of citation. If I write a paper criticising studies of poor design or quality and cite Prof. Levi’s Scientific Reports paper as an example, the citation count of the paper increases by one, but beyond this one-dimensional number, the reputation of the paper has actually declined (or ought to have).

  4. How can we be sure that Prof. Levi is interpreting, to his audience at large, all the other studies he cites in his video in a fair manner? The way the Times of India article its written, we can’t. We need to find (without any links) and follow-up on each one (without access to expertise) separately.

  For example, consider the “Harvard Medical School” study that purportedly found unattached spike proteins in the blood of young people with post-vaccination myocarditis. In this study, researchers worked with 16 people with post-vaccination myocarditis and 45 people without post-vaccination myocarditis, and found that those with the condition had unattached spike proteins in their bloodsteams.

  Conclusions: a) post-vaccination myocarditis is rare, which both Prof. Levi and Times of India leave out; b) the results are indicative because the cohort sizes are too small to reliably elucidate rare side-effects and the real extent of their rarity; c) per the paper itself, “the mRNA vaccine-induced immune responses did not differ between individuals who developed myocarditis and individuals who did not”; and d) spike-protein overproduction could be implicated in the mechanism connecting mRNA vaccination and myocarditis.

  This is just one study that Prof. Levi has invoked.

  Again, irrespective of the legitimacy (or not) of Prof. Levi’s various claims in his video, Times of India was duty-bound to raise these issues – or at least flag their relevance. The newspaper may believe it is ‘simply reporting’ something that someone somewhere said and is therefore free of blame, but that’s like saying you’re simply erecting a billboard reproducing Nick Naylor’s comments on smoking and are expecting to be free of blame. At least in the realm of reason and facts.

  2023.02.01

• Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes

  On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth’s surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply moving closer to the Sun. I.e. global warming was the result of changes in the Earth-Sun distance. Excerpt:

  The oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field are likely to be caused by the solar inertial motion about the barycentre of the solar system caused by large planets. This, in turn, is closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance caused by the positions of the Sun either closer to aphelion and autumn equinox or perihelion and spring equinox. Therefore, the oscillations of the baseline define the global trend of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance over a period of about 2100 years. In the current millennium since Maunder minimum we have the increase of the baseline magnetic field and solar irradiance for another 580 years. This increase leads to the terrestrial temperature increase as noted by Akasofu [26] during the past two hundred years.

  The New Scientist reported on July 16 that Nature has since kickstarted an “established process” to investigate how a paper with “egregious errors” cleared peer-review and was published. One of the scientists it quotes says the journal should retract the paper if it wants to “retain any credibility”, but the fact that it cleared peer-review in the first place is to me the most notable part of this story. It is a reminder that peer-review has a failure rate as well as that ‘prestige’ titles like Nature can publish crap; for instance, look at the retraction index chart here).

  That said, I am a little concerned because Scientific Reports is an open-access title. I hope it didn’t simply publish the paper in exchange for a fee like its less credible counterparts.

  Almost as if it timed it to the day, the journal Science – Nature‘s big rival across the ocean – published a paper that did make legitimate claims but which brooks disagreement on a different tack. It describes a way to keep sea levels from rising due to the melting of Antarctic ice. Excerpt:

  … we show that the [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] may be stabilized through mass deposition in coastal regions around Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. In our numerical simulations, a minimum of 7400 [billion tonnes] of additional snowfall stabilizes the flow if applied over a short period of 10 years onto the region (~2 mm/year sea level equivalent). Mass deposition at a lower rate increases the intervention time and the required total amount of snow.

  While I’m all for curiosity-driven research, climate change is rapidly becoming a climate emergency in many parts of the world, not least where the poorer live, without a corresponding set of protocols, resources and schemes to deal with it. In this situation, papers like this – and journals like Science that publish them – only make solutions like the one proposed above seem credible when in fact they should be trashed for implying that it’s okay to keep emitting more carbon into the atmosphere because we can apply a band-aid of snow over the ice sheet and postpone the consequences. Of course, the paper’s authors acknowledge the following:

  Operations such as the one discussed pose the risk of moral hazard. We therefore stress that these projects are not an alternative to strengthening the efforts of climate mitigation. The ambitious reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is and will be the main lever to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise. The simulations of the current study do not consider a warming ocean and atmosphere as can be expected from the increase in anthropogenic CO2. The computed mass deposition scenarios are therefore valid only under a simultaneous drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions.

  … but these words belong in the last few lines of the paper (before the ‘materials and methods’ section), as if they were a token addition to what reads, overall, like a dispassionate analysis. This is also borne out by the study not having modelled the deposition idea together with falling CO2 emissions.

  I’m a big fan of curiosity-driven science as a matter of principle. While it seemed hard at first to reconcile my emotions on the Science paper with that position, I realised that I believe both curiosity- and application-driven research should still be conscientious. Setting aside the endless questions about how we ought to spend the taxpayers’ dollars – if only because interfering with research on the basis of public interest is a terrible idea – it is my personal, non-prescriptive opinion that research should still endeavour to be non-destructive (at least to the best of the researchers’ knowledge) when advancing new solutions to known problems.

  If that is not possible, then researchers should acknowledge that their work could have real consequences and, setting aside all pretence of being quantitative, objective, etc., clarify the moral qualities of their work. This the authors of the Science paper have done but there are no brownie points for low-hanging fruits. Or maybe there should be considering there has been other work where the authors of a paper have written that they “make no judgment on the desirability” of their proposal (also about climate geo-engineering).

  Most of all, let us not forget that being Nature or Science doesn’t automatically make what they put out better for having been published by them.

  2019.07.18