Recently Daniel Falush’s group came out with a preprint, A tutorial on how (not) to over-interpret STRUCTURE/ADMIXTURE bar plots. If you read the science posts on this weblog (basically, if you read this weblog), and you haven’t read it, read it now.
At his weblog, Paint My Chromosomes, Falush has talked about both the production of the preprint (I had a minor stimulatory role), and the attempt to get it published somewhere. This reaction is strange to me:
We also had our first journal rejection, from eLife. It has not been my habit to live-tweet journal rejections and am not intending to start now. I am a journal editor myself and do not think the process would benefit from being turned into a public performance. I was disappointed because eLife claims to hold itself to higher standards, trying to change publication by judging papers on their true worth rather than on simple measures of impact and also because the reason given was silly:
“..but feel that the target audience is a rather specialised one.”
Of course I’m biased. But this strikes me as crazy. The third most cited paper in the history of the journal Genetics, is Jonathan Pritchard’s Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data. Take a look at the list, and note the papers that it is more cited than (e.g., a Sewall Wright paper from 1931, and Tajima’s 1989 paper!).
To be sure, the number of times that a paper is cited is not a good measure of how often it is read and understood. And that’s kind of the point of Falush’s preprint, to actually give some guidance to people who use model based clustering in a turnkey fashion without any deep comprehension of its limitations and biases. The nuts & bolts of the inferences of population structure may be specialized, but analysis of structure is a routine part of many different types of papers, in particular in medical genetics where variants may have different effects in different genetic backgrounds.
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