Talk:Scientific Reports

Peer review
I added some info on the paid rapid review flap here. Does anyone know what happened to that initiative? I can't seem to find it on the journal website but also can't find much in the way of follow on news. Thanks, Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 15:53, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I was just asked to peer review by the journal and put this question to them. They replied, "I can confirm that Scientific Reports is no longer running our ‘FastTrack’ service. This service was offered during a short trial period last year and is no longer available for authors." I've suggested that they state this publicly so we can cite it since I don't think my personal communication is up to Wikipedia standards. Dan Eisenberg (talk) 03:24, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Small proposed addition
Scientific Reports is also indexed in Chemical Abstracts Service 108.171.133.172 (talk) 13:13, 22 December 2016 (UTC)


 * ✅ Altamel (talk) 05:15, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Licensing history/references
The infobox says the license is "Creative Commons Attribution" which seems to be accurate now http://www.nature.com/srep/about/open-access at least is the default, but when Scientific Reports launched it used noncommercial licenses and added CC-BY later, see http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cc-licenses.html and http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cc-by.html ... if anyone has a reference for when the default was switched to CC-BY or what the current breakdown of licenses for published articles is, I'd love to see them, and will add to the article if nobody else does first. Mike Linksvayer (talk) 22:56, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

When did Scientific Reports begin publishing?
Countless journals, published by Nature and others, even on their main official page (as in External Links https://www.nature.com/srep/ ) do not have an "About" page, no history of the journal, etc. That's a surprising omission. At any rate, if anyone knows when Scientific Reports began publishing, that'd be a good addition to this article. Thanks! Bob Enyart, Denver KGOV radio host (talk) 21:12, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Peer review process
The sentence about "scientific quality" reads a bit like an advertisement. Do we have good sources to improve it? There's also an article about Peter Wittek on the matter. --Nemo 18:24, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Acceptance rate Scientific Reports
I added the acceptance rate for Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/content/scirep-facts/index.html), but it is deleted as it is not from an independent source. Fair enough, but why do we allow these references: https://www.nature.com/srep/about/editors & https://www.nature.com/srep/guide-to-referees#criteria to be in the article then? Kenji1987 (talk) 10:42, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Because those source non-controversial info. The journal is not going to list people that are not editors, for example. However, journals sometimes wave rejection rates around in promotional flyers and such, so that info is more sensitive and generally not verifiable by someone not connected to the journal. --Randykitty (talk) 11:07, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply. Could I rephrase it: "Scientific Reports claims to have an acceptance rate of 56%"? Kenji1987 (talk) 11:11, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * No, I wouldn't do that, we can't start adding everything anyone claims to our articles. Especially not if it can be seen as promotional. --Randykitty (talk) 11:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Actually, journals lie all the time about their editorial board members. The acceptance rate is often at least partially a third-party piece of information (submission managers are often involved) and it's more objective than impact factor, which is easy to manipulate and impossible to verify. Nemo 12:12, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * , that is only partially correct. Yes, predatory journals routinely lie about board members, but I've never heard about a reputed publisher (Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, etc) like the Nature Publishing Group doing something like that. And while it is correct that many journals use third-party software to handle manuscripts, it still is the journal itself that reports rejection percentages. Also, such statistics are not always comparable. ManuscriptCentral, for example, counts every iteration of a manuscript as a separate submission, so if a manuscript underwent two revisions and got accepted on the third time, MC says that the acceptance percentage is 33%, whereas any sane person would say that this is one manuscript that ended up being accepted, so this is 100%. Other journals "boost" their rejection rates (to appear more selective) by rejecting any manuscript that needs "major revision" and encouraging the authors to re-submit. Etc. So even if a journal does not embellish its rejection rate and derives its statistics from third-party software, you still don't really know what those figures mean. --Randykitty (talk) 12:58, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * That's why I thought I could add it. NPG has a good reputation, and hence would not lie about this? Kenji1987 (talk) 15:32, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * It looks like you're assuming Scientific Reports is not a predatory journal. That's not an assumption we can make. It works the other way round: if it were found to lie about editorial board members, then we may need to consider it a predatory journal. But I was not getting there: the reputational pressures are the same for all journals, so a mistake can always happen, maybe based on a misunderstanding compounded by self-interested carelessness. Nemo 06:25, 2 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I indeed assume that this is not a predatory journal. There has been criticism on the journal and no doubt mistakes will happen (we're all human after all), but I strongly doubt that a very reputable publisher like NPG would resort to predatory tactics and would intentionally list people that didn't give explicit permission. NPG has a rock-solid reputation that is of enormous value to them: whenever they start a new journal, it is almost immediately picked up by the most prestigious indexing services, for example. Also authors will eagerly submit good papers, something they're normally very hesitant about with new journals. Hence it would be incredibly stupid of NPG to ruin that reputation with intentionally doubtful practices at one of their journals (let alone a highly visible one like this). --Randykitty (talk) 09:01, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

I found an independent study commenting on the acceptance rate of Scientific Reports (https://peerj.com/articles/981/#results), may I add it? Kenji1987 (talk) 04:22, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, while noting that it's a self-reported number which the authors did not check in any way (if I read correctly). The fact that specific figure was chosen for inclusion by the authors is sufficient to consider it prima facie relevant (as opposed to some original research in picking up numbers around the web). Nemo 09:57, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Controversies section
Could add I section on controversies. The Scientist Reported: "Mass Resignation from Scientific Reports’s Editorial Board" (https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/mass-resignation-from-scientific-reportss-editorial-board-30650). Also here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers & https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-journal/scientific-reports/

Controversies Nineteen editorial board members of Scientific Report decided to step down due to the journal not retracting a plagiarised study published in 2016. (https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/mass-resignation-from-scientific-reportss-editorial-board-30650 & https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers). On March 20, 2017, Scientific Reports decided to retract the paper (https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/mass-resignation-from-scientific-reportss-editorial-board-30650).

Another study, published in Scientific Reports, claimed that homeopathy could treat pain in rats. The journal retracted the study 8 months later. (https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-journal/scientific-reports/)

Critics such as Derek Lowe have questioned the peer review procedure of Scientific Reports (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers). Kenji1987 (talk) 10:52, 1 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Sounds ok, but it would be good to have an overall secondary source for the matter, e.g. whether the retraction index of Scientific Reports is considered higher than average: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3187237/ Nemo 12:17, 1 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Could you find information on this? Thanks. By the way I added the section. Kenji1987 (talk) 15:28, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Some more items: a secondary source, and a primary one from a subject-matter expert. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 04:18, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Could you add them? thanks Kenji1987 (talk) 04:27, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi,
 * This controversy section now leads to a WP:PROPORTION problem. This article seems to try to give the impression that the Scientific Reports is a untrustworthy journal with incompetent reviewing board by pointing at some anecdotal flaws (like any other scientific publisher accounted). The only critic is the Derek Lowe's one and it is not enough to justify the length of the controversy section. So two things can be done to balance the article: 1) to have a section about acclaimed publications revealed by the Scientific Reports. 2) To have more critics and metacritics about the Scientific Reports showing that this is a mediocre to average quality journal; like https://scirev.org/journal/scientific-reports/ grading the review process between "moderate" and "good".
 * --176.182.200.156 (talk) 14:37, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * P.S. As I'm not a native English speaker, I can't do it myself, sorry.
 * Neutrality on Wikipedia doesn't mean saying one good thing for every bad thing. The "Controversies" section reports what reliable sources have said; scirev.org appears to be inadmissible per WP:UGC. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 22:54, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
 * A possible improvement in relation to this might be condensing by summarizing several sources together in common sentences (where they're on the exact same point), avoiding direct quotes, etc. — Paleo  Neonate  – 23:27, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Should I remove the tag? There is very little development since the editor raised concerns about this section? Kenji1987 (talk) 07:12, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Press release content
I have removed this content:

"People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) approached Scientific Reports to request retraction of a paper by scientists at the National Institutes of Health in which rhesus macaques were used for experiments in which they were "deprived of water, strapped into restraint chairs and shown videos of shapes engaging in human-like behaviors while experimenters measured their eye movements". "

because it amounts to "activists issued a press release" and is misleading about the study. For example: they were "deprived of water, strapped into restraint chairs" but fails to mention the "for a total of 15 minutes" part, or the "rewarded with juice at the end of the 15-minute session" part, or anything else that would provide a basically fair description of the study.

Also, nothing appears to have happened as a result. The paper was not retracted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 5 March 2024 (UTC)