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Post by kitkor on May 10, 2011 1:16:59 GMT
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Post by Apoplast on May 10, 2011 3:02:11 GMT
This article reminds me that despite having an impact factor north of 4, PLoS ONE accepts nearly 70% of submissions.
Addition: I should add my thanks to kitkor for posting this! It's good to see what is being proposed.
My previous comment was only meant to express concerns I have that remain after reading the article. Hopefully this paper will not cause people to, for example, start posting pictures of their carnivorous teasel they are growing. Such conclusions would be rather premature.
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Post by kitkor on May 10, 2011 21:45:53 GMT
I agree with you, Apoplast. The title is misleading, but the authors make it clear in the discussion that while they've shown seed biomass increases with feeding larvae, the result should be replicated. They also noted that such evidence alone does not make a plant carnivorous, citing Juniper et al. for the criteria to be considered carnivorous.
I did notice some odd formatting, grammar, and relatively small sample size as my concerns with this paper. But experimental ecological "Note" type articles often take this form.
I've had overall good experiences with PLoS ONE; 4 of my 5 articles have been published there. Often, we'd face rejection first at one of the more prestigious journals (like Journal of Bacteriology or Applied and Environmental Microbiology), and my perception was always that rejection was a default position for those journals, even though the work was sound and novel. We once had terrible reviewers at AEM who advised rejection based on what turned out to be misunderstandings of terminology (Brit vs. American usage), and the journal refused to allow a response to reviewers. Journals like PLoS ONE and the online BioMedCentral journals have such high acceptance rates because they don't refuse based on perceived importance of the work. That's not to say, however, that terrible stuff doesn't get through...
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Post by Apoplast on May 11, 2011 14:31:29 GMT
While I share the concerns you raised about the study, I also have a host of others. Notably, that the N added via dead inverts was less than the estimated N increase in the seeds. This leads to questions about allocation and tissue construction costs that need to be, at the very least, cursorily addressed to give the findings any relevance.
I definitely did not intend to imply that all the work presented in PLoS ONE is suspect or of low quality. It is a good outlet, particularly for the subset of work that is intended to be rapidly reported. And of course, all journals can slip up and publish questionable studies too, even well established and long respected journals (I'm looking at you PNAS).
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