Also: about peer reviewed papers - make sure you check who it was that reviewed the paper and where it was published. I could send in a paper which states human shit cures cancer to an "institute" in India and get it published in some BS "science journal" with 50 peer reviews from some indian scientists nobody has ever heard of and probably don't even exist or who do exist and only care about making money.
I would only have to pay a few thousand dollars.
Best way to deal with this is to look up the journal's "Impact Factor". This shows how many times papers have been cited in other journals and their resultant quality.
IF >20=Science, Nature, JAMA
IF <2=Indian Times, DUH, etc.
This is not as good a guide as it once was. There is a lot of stuff that is absolutely not reproduciable in the higher up journals. Publishing has always been somewhat political and a who you know type thing and I feel that it is only getting worse. Though in this case I imagine the Indian Times is indeed shitter. But certainly don't trust the leading journals.
I myself am listed as a author (not first or last) in a recent enough paper published in Nature communications and currently have another paper in the same journal under review.
, both as a first and last author (not recently, though) and it was very tough to get done.
Many people in our field never had a paper published there and several of mine were rejected as well, then published in lesser journals.