[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting

Your Book Review: Making Nature - by Scott Alexander

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2022-05-20 21:00:07

[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]

The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.

For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.