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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Journal impact factors and the reliability of research results

Via researchblogging.org: A paper in Molecular Psychiatry (subscription required) finds that impact factor weakly correlated with unreliability of research papers, at least in gene association studies. However, there's no reason to think that this finding is not generally applicable to other areas.

It supports statements I've repeatedly made telling people to be careful about immediately believing stuff that appears in high profile/"sexy" journals like Nature Genetics. The nitty gritty part of science (read "replication studies") are usually published in less well-known and less sexy journals, and lord knows it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get negative results (i.e., "see, they were wrong—there's actually no signal there at all") published.

That said, I still want at least one of my papers to eventually appear in Nature Genetics (scientist street cred).

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