Nature’s Response Missed the Point
Nature recently replied to my complaint regarding citations in the paper Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia by Akbari et al.
The journal’s conclusion was straightforward: no correction or addendum would be pursued. That outcome itself did not surprise me. Journals are generally reluctant to intervene in citation disputes, especially when a big Harvard lab is involved, and I never assumed that Nature would compel the authors to amend their paper.
What surprised me was the reasoning.
After discussing the matter internally, Nature wrote:
“authors have a reasonable degree of flexibility in choosing to cite papers they feel are the most relevant to their study.”
The editor also stated:
“it is not required that all papers related to a topic are cited to support every point in a paper.”
When I read those sentences, my immediate reaction was confusion.
Who exactly is making that argument?
Certainly not me.
At no point did I claim that Akbari et al. were required to cite every paper related to polygenic adaptation, ancient DNA, or human evolution. Such a standard would be absurd. Every scientific paper omits relevant references. Every bibliography is selective. Nobody disputes this.
My complaint was about something entirely different.
The Akbari et al. paper presents evidence of directional selection on complex traits using ancient DNA time series. My concern was that my previous papers had already addressed essentially the same question and reported evidence consistent with directional selection on polygenic traits through time, using overlapping datasets and similar methods.
One can certainly argue that those papers were imperfect. One can argue that the datasets were smaller, the methods less sophisticated, or the conclusions less robust. Science is full of early studies that are later refined by better data and better methods.
But those would at least be arguments about the substance of the issue.
Instead, Nature’s response seems to treat my complaint as though I had simply requested a longer bibliography. That is what I find difficult to understand.
There is an obvious difference between saying:
“You failed to cite every relevant paper.”
and saying:
“You failed to acknowledge prior work directly related to your paper’s central contribution.”
The first complaint is unreasonable but the second is a question of scientific attribution.
Perhaps Nature genuinely sees no meaningful distinction between the two. If so, I would have preferred them to say so explicitly. At least then we would be debating the same issue.
Instead, I was left with the peculiar feeling that the argument I had spent weeks making had been replaced with a much weaker one and then rejected.
What Nature expressed was that authors cannot be expected to cite all papers related to a topic.
And that is a point with which I completely agree but it is also a point that has very little to do with the complaint I actually made.
The entire experience has made me reflect on how difficult it is to discuss scientific attribution in the first place. Nobody likes talking about priority. The moment a researcher raises the issue, there is an assumption that they are simply upset about not being cited.
Yet attribution matters. Science is cumulative. The historical record of a field is built from thousands of decisions about what gets acknowledged, what gets remembered, and what gets forgotten. Those decisions affect reputations, careers, and our understanding of how ideas developed.
For that reason, I think there is a meaningful difference between an incomplete bibliography and the omission of prior work on a study’s central question.
Nature apparently disagrees, or perhaps never reached that question at all.
There was one final part of the email that I found particularly puzzling.
After informing me that no further action would be taken, the editor wrote:
“Please note that discussions regarding potential amendments to our published papers are confidential, and should be treated as such, including email conversations such as this one.”
I confess I do not understand this request.
I understand why peer review is confidential. I understand why anonymous referees need protection. I understand why editors require private deliberations while decisions are being made.
But this was not an unpublished manuscript under review.
This was a discussion about whether a published paper accurately acknowledged prior work and whether the published scientific record should be amended.
Why should such discussions be confidential?
Indeed, one could argue the opposite. If journals are making decisions about attribution, priority, and corrections to the literature, there is a public interest in understanding how those decisions are reached.
Perhaps Nature has good reasons for preferring these discussions to remain private. If so, those reasons are not obvious to me.
The request struck me as particularly strange because it appeared at the end of a process that had already concluded. The journal had reviewed the complaint, consulted internally, reached a decision, and informed me that the matter was closed. Having done so, it then requested that the discussion itself be treated as confidential.
I genuinely wonder what purpose that serves.
In any case, the dispute is now over as far as Nature is concerned. The journal has reviewed the complaint, consulted internally, and decided that no further action will be taken. What remains, however, is the question that prompted the complaint in the first place: where exactly is the line between an omitted reference and an omitted contribution?
That was always the issue I was trying to raise. Not whether every relevant paper should be cited, but whether prior work directly addressing the same scientific question deserves acknowledgment when later studies achieve greater visibility. After reading Nature’s response several times, I am still left with the impression that this distinction was never really addressed.