Someone needs to explain to me why this is a Nature publication …



Granted it is Nature Protocols which started its publication run when I was in grad school and is likely less high-impact as full blown Nature.  Seriously tough – using the Solver Add-in in Excel to do non-linear curve fitting gets published?  If a younger version of myself knew about this, I’d have a Nature publication as a junior in undergrad.

It should be noted that such Nature worthy protocols are accomplished in the following 6 lines of R code (in this case for fitting a Michaelis-Menton curve):

f = formula(v ~ vmax*s/(km + s))
data = data.frame(
   s = c(1250, 625, 313, 156, 78, 39, 20, 10),
   v = c(148.68, 123.66, 96.84, 69.76, 45.54, 27.84, 16.38, 9.24)
)

fit = nls(f, data=data, start=list(vmax=1, km=1),
          algorithm='port', trace=F, lower=0)
summary(fit)

(note: I’m including the blank line in my 6-line count) On a similar thread, does that mean I can get a publication for this?