I'm not picking on the paper linked but I'd like to highlight the contrast between the abstract and the "author's summary". Having finished the abstract, I was left thinking this might be interesting. It's somewhat out of my field but I'm trying to learn more about epigenetics. Having read the "author's summary", I was suddenly going "wow. Fascinating".
I've had the pleasure of operating in quite diverse fields so far so I feel I have delved enough to comment. An early dalliance with paleontology (early bird flight) was full of colourful and entertaining papers and books. The concepts were no less complicated but the communication was effervescent. Conversely, genetics papers tend to be almost consciously arcane and plodding. I'd be happy to excuse this as reflective of the complexity of the field but, in time spent working on lab on chip diagnostics, I read widely in engineering areas such as microfluidics, chip design and fabrication, electronics etc. Despite being highly technical, the papers were shorter, simple to follow and, to bring me to my core point, facilitated a generalist jumping from papers in one field to another.
Increasingly, it seems to me that genetics papers are written for a narrower and narrower audience. Despite the relevance to all areas of biology, these papers are not widely read by non-geneticists and it is difficult to criticise them unduly for not doing so. Is peer review in genetics so demanding that it mitigates against drafting papers which might be suitable for the uninitiated? Will this trend worsen as bioinformatics comes more and more to the fore?
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1000538
There is a lot of conflicting data which has to be interpreted somehow.
we need to separate and know that statistical significant data may not be clinically relevant. and those that are not significant may also be of clinical significant please let's take note
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