Paul Stamets on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1385
SUBJECT: SCIENCE
The short answer
Stamets claims his bee-virus mushroom research was published in Nature, that only 7% of submissions to Nature are published, and that his article ranks in the top 1% of all articles ever published in the Nature ecosystem. Stamets is referring to "Extracts of Polypore Mushroom Mycelia Reduce Viruses in Honey Bees" (Stamets et al. 2018), co-authored with USDA and WSU researchers on mushroom extracts reducing deformed wing virus and Lake Sinai virus levels in honey bees.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
We published in Nature. Only 7% of the articles submitted in nature get published in the nature publication ecosystem. To this day, our article is in the top 1% of all articles ever published in the nature
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Stamets is referring to "Extracts of Polypore Mushroom Mycelia Reduce Viruses in Honey Bees" (Stamets et al. 2018), co-authored with USDA and WSU researchers on mushroom extracts reducing deformed wing virus and Lake Sinai virus levels in honey bees. The publisher page (nature.com) and the NIH PubMed record both confirm the paper appeared in Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio journal published by Springer Nature, not in the flagship journal Nature itself; the two are editorially and statistically distinct publications, and Scientific Reports has a much higher acceptance rate and much larger annual volume than Nature's flagship title, making the "7%" figure inapplicable to where this paper actually appeared. Neither source supports a claim that this specific paper ranks in the "top 1%" of all articles ever published in Nature or Scientific Reports; no such bibliometric ranking is cited or verifiable from these two sources. The underlying scientific findings on fungal extracts reducing bee virus loads are not in dispute here, but the framing of where the paper was published and its comparative prestige is inaccurate and self-serving.