User:TheChurroGuy/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Nature (journal)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I enjoy performing research and reading exciting work that other individuals are doing. Research journals are a culmination of experiments and studies that have undergone a vetting process to ensure that the science conducted is up to a certain standard and reproducible, and Nature is one of the premier research journals that holds a long history of scientific achievement behind it. Being able to evaulate and read an article about Nature gives me a sense of what is needed to perform better science, to hold myself to a higher standard, and to observe what standards other people hold for science. In reading the article, my impression of it was initially what I expected of the research journal. It has a long history, but it was interesting to see how it has garnered controversy in relation to politics and unethical treatment of research subjects and patients.

Evaluate the article
Lead section

The lead section of the article contains a clear introductory sentence describing what Nature is (research publication), where it is located (based in London, England), when it was established (autumn 1869), why it was established (as a public forum for innovation), and who established it (Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmilan). It does include a brief description of the article's major sections, does not include information not present in the article, and remains relatively concise.

Content

The article remains on topics discussing only material related to the research publication, and the article appears to have up-to-date information with its last edited date being April 6, 2021. There is a section of topics in the "Controversy" section addressing topics related to wrongs committed against historically underrepresented populations as Nature published an editorial entitled "Removing Statues of Historical figures risks whitewashing history: Science must acknowledge mistakes as it marks its past." It made a case of stating that removing names and statues of scientists who committed known unethical and abusive experiments such as Thomas Parran Jr. who oversaw the Tuskegee syphilis experiment could lead to a repetition of the same mistakes, and instead of removing them from history, they should be supplemented. The article then discussed the public outcry and reactions that followed along with the response by Nature to modify the editorial. Overall, the content covers the achievements and mistakes of Nature concisely.

Tone and Balance

The article's tone remains neutral, but the sections related to the negative coverage of Nature such as the "Retractions" section is painfully vague and consisting of only 7 sentences. For example, it stated that "a paper was published with important figure anomalies from an author with a past of publishing figure anomalies." The fact that the publication can make mistakes in regards to its vetting process remains underrepresented. Moreover, a section describing a detracted paper which was based on fraudulent data was written in a way that absolves Nature of responsibility as the article stated other prominent publications like Science also experienced this scandal. The article does pull toward the viewpoint that Nature largely does not make mistakes.

Sources and References

The vast majority of the article's sources comes from Nature itself. Facts and statistics as well as honors were largely derived from the research publication while the controversies portion were also largely derived from the publication surprisingly. Some sources were from news articles that have a recent history of lopsided news reporting such as South China Morning discussing how the link between COVID-19 and Wuhan, China increased attacks on Asians but the content of the materials remains relatively accurate with other credible sources such as The New York Times. There are several sentences in the "Publication" section that have the [citation needed] labels, but links to sources work.

Organization and writing quality

The article is really well-written that carries a professional tone and remains concise without unnecessary asides while providing necessary context on the significance of details. For example, the section regarding the editorial stating why controversial figures in science should not be removed included the context in which the letter came weeks after a white supremacists rally in Charlottesville, Virginia resulted in violence and a death of a young woman. The article remains largely free of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors while remaining organized in a chronological manner in regards to history first, then significant select publications.

Images and Media

The article does include images that enhances the understanding of the research publication, but there are only three and two of those are covers from the publication. The first is a cover of a notable issue of Nature while the second is the first title page of the first issue to highlight the historical aspect of Nature. The last image is a chart visualizing the statement that the majority of publications in the journal do not receive much citations and the distribution of the number of citations remains strongly right-skewed although there are a significant amount of papers that receive 100+ citations. The images are well-captioned to describe what it is, and they appear to adhere to copyright regulations. However, they appear to be just inserted on the right side of the text meant to be present.

Talk page discussion

The talk page discussion seems to center around Nature 's tendency to self-report information and articles to bolster its reputation in self-references as there was a section devoted to its process of peer review, and how it tends to tout its own merits. It seems that users were readily in agreement with this fact. In addition, more recent discussions have included Nature 's involvement in politics as it was noted that Nature had recently published technical and self-described "mediocre" data from mainland China as part of a broader discussion of research faculty passing sensitive research technologies to China in the example of Dr. Charles M. Lieber arrested for making false statements to the United States Department of Defense and Harvard investigators about participation in a Chinese research program. Nature is still held in high regards, but the article about Nature tends to self-reference which largely goes against policy to have third-parties evaluate the entity. The discussion seems to be mainly about how the surrounding geopolitical landscape affects the entity rather than about the content itself as we discussed in class. It does makes sense as classroom discussions tend to evaluate the material itself in a vacuum while contributors have to take into account the factors that could lead to a deviation from a neutral point of view.

Overall impressions

The article itself appears to be regularly updated because the entity is highly regarded, wielding influence within the scientific community; it describes the purpose of Nature well in addition to the factors that contributed to its rise, but it tends to underrepresent its shortcomings largely due to the fact that the article mainly contains self-references that has a vested interest in maintaining its self-image. If third-party sources could be used to cite shortcomings as well as strengths, then the article could be improved.