#i have some sympathy when it comes to the vague/inefficient language given the authors are not native english speakers (french)

[blue-hi]

i’m gonna get into this because i’m bored and want something to do. i’m not gonna post the paper because i feel a little mean and petty and spreading those vibes far and wide is not what i wanna do right now, just blowing off some steam. that being said if you wanna know the paper lmk. under a cut because i imagine it could get long and maybe also unhinged. also i have no plan this is just off the cuff

background: i’m a postbacc with the neuroscience lab i joined my senior year of university, we study the neural mechanisms of different eye movements. i’m about to start a master’s program in science and technical professional writing so i’m the resident english major. this paper is about attention and how it (allegedly) explores space rhythmically

0.5: “saccade” (type of eye movement) is in the title but i don’t remember ever seeing it in the paper. the task includes a saccade from a cue to a target but really that’s about it 1: you know what a garden path sentence is, right? go look it up if you don’t. the first sentence of the abstract is one. off to a great start. there are several sentences of the abstract i understand all the words in, but not in that order. there are only three (3) sentences of the abstract i have no problem with, out of i think nine (9). incredible ratio 2: i can’t really speak on the quality of the science, for a few reasons– i’m a baby neuroscientist so sometimes (many times) rationale for experiment design just goes over my head. that’s ok. the main reason i can’t speak to how well the Did A Science is because i can’t understand the paper. like the language. oftentimes in lab meeting this morning we had a question and we just didn’t know the answer because the paper was being vague for some reason 2.5: one of the grad students is our resident expert in data collection and analysis, and at one point she got up and explained how she would expect a certain analysis to be done versus how it appears the paper did the analysis. i didn’t really understand it that much but regardless i do understand that it was strange. and again we don’t know why they did it. because they didn’t tell us. 2.75: many things go unexplained, like acronyms that just appear. is it common knowledge that “MUA” stands for multi-unit activity? maybe, i don’t know. i do know that it wasn’t defined in the text body, but it was in the materials & methods section, at the end of the paper which i didn’t get to because honestly i just was not having a great time. and we’ll get into that. we’re not even there yet. one of the reviewers said something along the same lines. oh, we’ll come back to the peer reviewers. 3: THE FIGURES. THE PROOFREADING ON THE FIGURES IS TERRIBLE. GUYS IT’S SO BAD. there are 10 figures in this paper. i didn’t get past 4. there are problems wrt 3 out of these 4 figures. this is the main thing that’s fucking me up. there may be some numbers after this one but this is the big one. this is why i’ve been thinking about this all day. Figure 2– besides being utterly incomprehensible for most people in the lab, nothing wrong with the figure itself. however. at one point, the text references a certain time range and then directs me, the reader, to reference Fig. 2a, insert. so i look at Fig. 2a, insert. and i notice that in the caption for Fig. 2a, insert, the time period references does not match the time range stated in the text. it turns out. the text was referencing FIGURE 2B. i’ having a great time here guys Figure 3– there are four sub-figures to Figure 3: Fig. 3a, Fig. 3b, Fig. 3b, and Fig. 3c. I’m not wrong there i swear to god that’s what it says. there are two Fig. 3b.s. but not in the caption. the caption has the correct Fig. 3a/b/c/d. the text never references Fig. 3d, which is just as well since it doesn’t exist apparently. maybe. the caption and the figure itself disagree. the text does reference Fig. 3b. i don’t know which one it’s referring to. i don’t think it does either. this is ridiculous Figure 4– mostly fine except for Fig. 4e. the caption says it shows the “percentage of hits,” ie. the number of times the monkey did the task right. this is fine. what isn’t is that the y-axis on the figure itself says FAs (%), or percentage of false alarms, which. which isn’t the same thing. it’s wrong. false alarms are shown in Fig. 7e, by the way. this is when i tapped out. my notes on this figure are hysteric. how did this get published. how did no one notice. this got published in Nature. 4: none of the peer reviewers noticed. the peer review notes are public and available and i read through their comments. nothing on these figures. wtf. when the authors respond, all three reviewers say that their concerns have been satisfactorily answered (fascinating, as some of the questions they had initially we also had, after publication. i’ll have to look back to see how these questions were answered but still. we had the same questions.), and said it was a fantastic manuscript and they wholeheartedly all recommended it for publication. MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THERE IS NO FIGURE 3D HOW ON EARTH DID YOU NOT NOTICE. 4.5: is that it. i’m done

in my hater era. currently trying to figure out how a paper that my lab's postdoc said was in his "top ten or five worst papers [he's] ever read" (which means a lot, coming from him) ended up getting published in nature communications, of all places