Not that Nature papers can't be suspect, but they're much less likely to be;

So, funny story. As you know, I got my PhD in a non-science field. And right as I was writing my dissertation on irregular verbs in English, Nature published a paper analyzing irregular verbs in English. Written by a team of scientists (biologists?) who were like, "We know statistics. That means we're qualified to do statistics on warm and fuzzy fields that we don't respect, like linguistics! Let's show those linguists how real science is done!"

And that paper got mocked relentlessly in my field. Because one, they took a really obvious and well-known premise and cast their number-crunching as a Big Discovery, in a way that felt super condescending. As the head of my program put it, "If only linguists ever thought of such things!"

And second, because they missed all the other factors at work. It was like if a biologist came along and ran a statistical analysis of the geographical distribution of Protestants and Catholics in central Europe and explained Fritz's wars solely in terms of this one factor. Historians would be like, "Thanks? It's nice to have the numbers, but we kind of already knew religion was relevant? And you're forgetting all the other explanatory causes? Maybe because you're NOT HISTORIANS?"

So hilariously, I, who had *only* ever heard of Nature in the context of this one article, got the impression that this was a popular magazine where anybody could publish on anything, like biologists on linguistics, and not a serious journal. :P

It was only when I used the word "popular" in my dissertation that one of my committee members was taken aback and had to set me straight.

Me: "Okay, I'll take your word for it and remove that word, but it doesn't *seem* like they're doing serious science."

Lol.