Track your comments!
[x]


When you register, comments on your articles and replies to your comments appear here. Register Now!

Sign in to your account
[x]

Not a Scientific Blogging member yet?

Register Now for a Free Scientificblogging.com Account

  • Customize your profile with pictures, banner, a blogroll and more.
  • Leave comments on articles, add other members to your friend lists, chat with people on the site.
  • Write blog posts that can be seen by hundreds of thousands of readers.

It's free and it only takes a minute!

Already a Scientific Blogging member?

Sign In Now

Fake Banner
By Hong Zhang | June 1st 2009 05:40 PM | 3 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
.

More The Truth Finder articles

All

About Hong Zhang

Many years of research experience in influenza and cancer with papers published in Science, PNAS, et al. Ph.D. in microbiology.... Full Bio

Swine flu is a hot topic for many health care related professionals. However, the receptors specific for human, swine or avian influenza viruses are still unclear, because that conflicting results have been published in top scientific journals.

One of the papers was published in Nature Medicine recently (Vol. 13, 147-149 (2007)). The main conclusion was "ex vivo cultures of human nasopharyngeal, adenoid and tonsillar tissues can be infected with H5N1 viruses in spite of an appearent lack of these receptors", which was based on Fig. 1e and Fig. 1h of the article. However, my opinion is that Fig. 1e and Fig. 1h didn’t provide strong enough evidence for the main conclusion but only provided the results of single experiment with huge experimental errors and without statistical significance. 

To make it clearer, I combined the Fig. 1e with Fig. 1h of that article and made a new Figure (see Figure bellow). I would like to get opinions from other scientists whether the results meet the four general criteria for Nature journals or not.

The four general criteria for manuscripts to be published in Nature journals are:

 1. Provide strong evidence for its conclusions;
 2. Novel;
 3. Of extreme importance to scientists in the specific field;
 4. Ideally, interesting to researchers in other related disciplines.

Here is the combined Figure:
influenza A virus
 

Please make comments.

Comments

Hfarmer's picture
Swine flu is a hot topic, and nature is a semipopular journal......I don't know much about virology.

However I do know a secret by a semipopular journal like nature... their publishing cannot be solely based on academic concerns.  Swine flu is a hot topic.  The average person on the street knows about it.  The average person has a chance of being interested enough to buy a copy of nature if they see this. 

Hank's picture
The article was from 2007.  Heck, I didn't even know you could buy Nature on a newsstand.

Hfarmer's picture
I'm pretty sure I have seen it, then there are subscriptions, selling individual articles via internet.
I know I don't have to tell you magazines are in business to make money.  Catering to a more popular audience will sell more copy than a hardcore science article only 5 people could understand.

Add a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <sup> <sub> <a> <em> <strong> <center> <cite> <code> <TH><ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <br> <p> <blockquote> <strike> <object> <param> <embed> <del> <pre> <b> <i> <table> <tbody> <div> <tr> <td> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr> <iframe>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA
If you register, you will never be bothered to prove you are human again. And you get a real editor toolbar to use instead of this HTML thing that wards off spam bots.