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Nature and Science, kinda. Those articles, though very good, can be very buzzfeedy in their 'zeitgeist-ness'.

I got to talking with one of their editors a while back, they know they are the 'gatekeepers' to a scientific career, and they hate it. The guy said that in the first week of the year, the submissions that they have for just the first week for the first issue are so much, and of such high quality, that they could just shut down the rest of the submissions for the year and see no drop whatsoever in quality. Getting into Nature or Science is so prestigious, it will make your career if you are grad student. Unfortunately, it is effectively a lottery to get in them.

Not to say you can't "make it" in other journals, but Nature and Science are sure things. If you are a post-doc in some fields, you pretty much have to get in Nature or Science, sometimes twice, to be considered as a faculty recruit worth mentioning. It's a giant god-damn mess of a system. It is very 'up or out' and as such, we waste billions training students that have no chance, doing work that languishes in unranked journals, and generally loosing the trust of the public that pays us.

NIH is trying to help, but it and the NSF are so inundated with Bullshit Artists and Yes-men that I doubt they can get away from their sclerotic bureaucracies and change.




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