Nature editorial office.
"It feels like it's been a while since we've seen any truly heavyweight results."
Editor Warren said to the colleague beside him as he reviewed a new submission.
"Come on. Any paper that makes it through Nature is already considered heavyweight in academia." Editor Mende beside him shrugged.
Warren laughed. "Forget it. We know our own situation best."
Nature was certainly a top academic journal, with an impact factor as high as fifty. But during the submission process, in order to maintain that impact factor, they had also passed over many things.
Especially in recent years, several cases of fraud had come to light, and the conclusions of those fraudulent papers had been more shocking than the last.
Particularly recently.
This time, it was their old rival, Science, that had published an article titled "Doctored Images? A Neuroscience Image Detective Finds Signs of Fabrication in Dozens of Alzheimer's Disease Papers, Threatening the Mainstream Theory of the Disease," pointing out that a groundbreaking Alzheimer's disease paper published in Nature in 2006 had been fraudulent.
That groundbreaking paper had claimed that the cause of Alzheimer's disease was related to a molecule called Aβ*56.
As a result, the entire Alzheimer's disease research field had followed that paper's conclusions, pouring enormous research funding and more than a decade of effort into finding this thing called Aβ*56. The paper had even been cited more than 2,300 times.
And now, Science had presented evidence that the paper involved fraud, primarily image manipulation, with the possibility that multiple different experimental photographs had been spliced together.
By now, the matter had blown up across the entire academic world. Many teams researching Alzheimer's disease had come forward to condemn the paper's authors.
Naturally, Nature had also been pushed into the spotlight, since it bore responsibility for