“Public stress-related or organ-related RNA-seq data sets were added into this analysis and treated as replicates to make our results more robust” in a DE analysis. That’s insane, right?
Treating public datasets as additional replicates of your own experiment is not a good idea, right? Is there any right way to do it? Saw it on an article published on a journal with ~6 IF as I was searching for public plant datasets with a good number of replicates and I could not believe it… or am I missing something??