In my field nature papers have a reputation for employing a fair amount of poetic licence. Have no idea how universal this is .

I worked with someone (this is in astronomy) who said that papers in nature were the most likely to be wrong. They are in nature because they have a dramatic (new/unexpected) result. One good reason for a new/unexpected result is a mistake somewhere.

Edit: I'm not saying anything about this paper. I know nothing about this. Just a meta comment that, in really hard to get published in journals, there might be a bi-modality of papers. Really important and really wrong :)

This is correct. Think of nature as a journal that publishes papers with a high rate of false positives (claims that turn out to be untrue) on purpose,to intentionally stimulate the state of the art of science.

I have actively ignored Nature and Science papers for my entire career (with the exception of my one Nature publication, and W&C 1953 of course).

It likely says something that, as an epidemiologist, the only way I've ever gotten a paper into Nature/Science is during a scary infectious disease epidemic. The rest of the time, they're largely uninterested.

If compared to Buzzfeed or the Daily Mail, definitely not. If compared to more specialized academic publishers, yes.

Over a decade ago there were articles in there which were so obviously terrible tuat even a freshman could refute it. Sadly I can only vaguely recall a few curves from the cover and that it was shockingly bad.