Yeah I don't buy this.

If you're in STEM academia, it's quite common.

We have two of those on every floor, it's quite common near labs in the natural sciences, we use them every other day.

I have the same problem. Eventually I chose tips that seal perfectly yet only sit at the entrance of the canal. Worked for me. Alternatively you can get customs, custom IEMs or just custom ear tip molds (those exist and aren't expensive).

Wow, I hope it's treatable and can be kept under control. If you don't mind me asking, how much were you drinking before and how long? It's a bit unusual to onset at an age so young, makes me worried about myself.

I study in switzerland, and believe me, I had that thought many times even though it's in front of my eyes.

Don't know about flat earth, but I browse /r/birdsarentreal every now and then, they take the joke very very far sometimes, but I sincerely doubt anyone there doesn't know it's satire.

Lol yes it's satire

/r/switzerlandisfake would absolutely love this

Well yes. But let's say you're interested in a very particular method being used in a paper. That method is often not mentioned in abstracts or to enough detail to discern by a keyword search. Searching by anything that probes abstracts will never get you a comprehensive result. You need an engine that searches also article body. That's my whole point I'm raising.

Sci-hub for a literature search? It's gold for someone without a good institutional access or for some rare to find articles, but you can only search DOIs, no?

Gave it a whirl. It appears indeed powerful. Google sucks for literature search because most literature is behind paywalls, so you essentially search abstracts. Pubmed sucks because well... It's a got a bit of a primitive search algorithm. This actually works holy shit. I'll introduce it to my lab mates, thank you!

Yeah. You also missed the other 63758274850293759929384757 times it was posted.

You're absolutely right. IF is only appropriate as a metric when used to compare journals within the same field. Clinical stuff that make it to NEJM or The Lancet make the most cutting edge stuff in Nature, Cell and Science look like they're less important, then you have other smaller journals that my field publishes in like JASN and Kidney international and NDT which are even lower IF.

However sci rep has really lowered its IF even compared to other journals within the field, which in an ideal world should still be completely fine as its a negative-result journal making it inherently low impact. But unfortunately the stigma remains. Whenever you say you published there, people automatically give you a look in the life sciences. I would never bash negative results, they're vital. I do however dislike genuinely insignificant studies and especially associational studies. Correlations have importance but they're so... So overused it hurts.

It's common knowledge in academia. It's absolutely not a scam or predatory journal, it's even a part of the nature group lol. It's just that they decided some years ago to convert the journal to an "accept anything that is not fraud or terrible science." In academic terms, this means as long as your paper shows logical research and ethics they HAVE to publish it regardless of how meaningless or low impact it is. Because of this, the IF of the journal dropped dramatically over the last years and continues to drop as we speak.

To clarify further, I'll give an exaggerated example. If you conducted a study showing that age is a strong predictor of mortality (the older you are, the more likely you are to die), and you did all the proper statistics to show this correlation, then your paper will be published. Because, even though the conclusion is useless, it was derived scientifically and logically and so they have to publish it.

Don't get me wrong. It's a brilliant thing for science. For eons we've had the issue of academic journals only publishing high impact and flashy positive results. This is bad because all the negative results get buried in the basement of labs, and no one knows about them. Meaning others are bound to repeat the same research wasting money only to find negative results. But, on the other hand, you have people abusing this by publishing useless and not just negative results. And that is not so nice.

Edit: also I just noticed you said "pay to publish." Lol, all journals ask you to pay to publish. In fact, if one doesn't, it's probably a scam. And nature, amongst the top journals out there, takes thousands of dollars to publish.

Ah yes. Scientific reports. The "no one else accepted my publication so this is my last resort" journal.