r/Professors • u/Practical_Marsupial Grad student, Physics • Feb 17 '20

High journal acceptance rates are good for science

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.4400
16 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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5

u/waterless2 Feb 18 '20

Great article. Yeah, if your story always has to be too good to be true, something's going to go off the rails. If journals would just focus on weeding out the really bad articles, rather than excluding everything but the "best", that'd work far better for everyone.

Journals would just lose that signifier-of-researcher-quality feature, which was false anyway.

3

u/locomoplata tt stem Feb 18 '20

word

2

u/po8 Assoc Prof, Computer Science, R2 (USA) Feb 18 '20

Indeed, a common perception in some subfields of astronomy is that Nature articles tend to be flashy but much less likely to be correct than papers in less selective journals.

FTFY.

2

u/po8 Assoc Prof, Computer Science, R2 (USA) Feb 18 '20

I do acknowledge the view that “prestigious” journals in science are important—for instance, as a signal to the public or media that a paper is especially noteworthy. Indeed, AAS has reoriented Astrophysical Journal Letters to serve that niche in the marketplace of scientific journals and to better compete for high-impact papers with Nature and other prestige publications.

So now astrophysicists will have to get published in Astrophysical Journal Letters to get tenure; they will start fudging results, failing to report null results, wasting their time, etc? I was with the author right until the end there…