Supplementary info seems to me to be a double-edged sword--I just read
a Nature article that had 45 pages of supplementary info. This means
that you get a lot more for your money, but all of the methods and
their references go by the wayside if you are reading just the paper.
Why not have papers be as long as the authors want, now that almost
everything is internet-based? It would make the papers much more
organized overall, and would obviate the reference issue mentioned in
this thread. To avoid them being too too long, reviewers could object
to long-windedness etc. But, it would definitely make for a more
complete "lab notebook of the scientific community," assuming that
that is what we are after.
Incidentally, I have been curious in the past why journals are not
going out the window themselves--why not have individual labs just
post their most recent data and interpretations on their own websites,
with a comments section perhaps? (I know there are about a thousand
cynical reasons why not...) One could even have a place for
"reliability rating" or "impact rating" on each new chunk of data.
Anyway, it would be much more like a real-time, public lab notebook,
and would make interaction much faster, and cut out the publishing
middlemen.
JPK
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Phoebe Rice <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Another unfortunate aspect of this sort of editorial policy is that many of these papers contain almost no technical information at all, except for the supplement. I've started to avoid using Nature papers for class discussions becuase they leave the students so puzzled, and with a glossiness-is-all-that-matters idea of science.
>
>
> =====================================
> Phoebe A. Rice
> Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
> The University of Chicago
> phone 773 834 1723
> http://bmb.bsd.uchicago.edu/Faculty_and_Research/01_Faculty/01_Faculty_Alphabetically.php?faculty_id=123
> http://www.rsc.org/shop/books/2008/9780854042722.asp
>
>
> ---- Original message ----
>>Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:12:26 +0000
>>From: CCP4 bulletin board <[log in to unmask]> (on behalf of John R Helliwell <[log in to unmask]>)
>>Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Citations in supplementary material
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>Dear Victor,
>>I strongly support the stance that is in the Acta D Editorial.
>>Manfred Weiss worked very hard assembling those details and over quite
>>some time; he deserves our thanks.
>>Greetings,
>>John
>>
>>
>>On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Victor Lamzin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> I would like to bring to your attention the recent Editorial in Acta Cryst D
>>> (http://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2010/12/00/issconts.html), which
>>> highlights the long-standing issue of under-citation of papers published in
>>> the IUCr journals. The Editorial, having looked at the papers published in
>>> 2009 in Nature, Science, Cell and PNAS, concluded:
>>>
>>> 'almost half of all references to publications in IUCr journals end up being
>>> published in the supplementary material only... Not only does this mean that
>>> the impact factor of IUCr journals should be higher, but also that the real
>>> overall numbers of citations of methods papers are much higher than what is
>>> reported, for instance, by the Web of Science'
>>>
>>> Although this topic may seem to concern mostly methods developers, I think
>>> the whole research community will only benefit from more fair credit that we
>>> all give to our colleagues via referencing their publications. What do you
>>> think?
>>>
>>> Victor
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>Professor John R Helliwell DSc
>
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