They made me do it! By Then there's Physics

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They made me do it!

Patrick Brown, who some may recall had an excellent response to some of Pat Frank’s nonsense, has written an article claiming that he left out the full truth to get his climate change paper published. The suggestion is that there are only certain narratives that are acceptable and that he had to present results that suited this narrative in order to get his paper published in this high-impact journal.

Let me try and do some steelmanning. Yes, it is clear that there are many issues with the publication industry, including that to get published in some high-impact journals you need to submit papers with results that appeal to the editors. There are also clearly biases within scientific communities. Some of this we should push back against, but some is simply how this all works.

Clearly, journals like Nature and Science are aiming to publish novel, new results that are of current interest. Ideally, authors submit papers that actually have novel results that are of current interest, but some will massage their results to make them seem more interesting than they actually are. The latter is clearly dishonest and it is certainly possible to publish in these journals without doing this. Also, you don’t need to publish in these journals if the work doesn’t fit what is normally published there. There are plenty of good journals that publish detailed analyses that highlight the nuances and complexities.

At the end of the day, the people responsible for what is submitted, and eventually published, are the authors. They don’t need to publish in a particular journal if they disagree with what the editors, and reviewers, suggest. Patrick Brown seems to have been lead author of a paper that was published despite him regarding it as not being entirely truthful and he is now trying to claim that this somehow indicates a serious problem with his scientific community.

Even if there are issues within these scientific communities, what this mostly illustrates is that Patrick Brown seemed comfortable knowingly publishing a paper that wasn’t entirely truthful, and is now milking this for attention, which he has certainly got in some sectors of the mainstream media. Of course, if anything I’d written was covered positively in these outlets, I’d reflect on what I’d said. Patrick may, of course, have different standards.

Also, even in astronomy there is a saying that goes something like “if it’s published in Nature, it’s probably wrong“. So, it’s not as if these issues are unique to fields that have political relevance. The solution, in my view, is for researchers to submit papers that they regard as truthful, not submit papers that they don’t regard as the “full truth” and then claim that they were somehow forced to do so.

Finally, the reviews are public and it certainly seems that at least one of the reviewers highlighted the nuances that Patrick claimed would prevent this paper from being published. Not only did the authors’ response claim that their narrow framing was appropriate, this also doesn’t appear consistent with the suggestion that only certain narratives are acceptable to this scientific community.