Dante’s Inferno: Seven Deadly Sins in Scientific Publishing and How to Avoid Them

More than 700 years ago, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote an epic poem about a man's journey through the afterworlds of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In his Divine Comedy, he catalogued the vices and virtues of people who had passed into those spiritual domains, in part to provide a valuable insight to us, the living. Dante described hell as a very unhappy and inhospitable place that had different levels ranging from the blazing inferno of the eternally damned to a rather benign area, called the First Circle, which was reserved for worthy individuals who were born before the world was redeemed and therefore could not enter the gates of heaven.