Monday, February 02, 2009
two-for-one papers
Is it me or are more and more papers shoving all the important 'beef' of the paper into supporting information. Maybe it's just random that the few papers I've noticed and got round to reading in detail all have heaps and heaps of supporting data. I can understand sticking in videos or large images which don't go into regular print papers but the supporting information I've been reading have been as long as the original paper and covered all sorts of (to me at least) important methods and analysis details. I guess it's good that the detail is provided with the paper but it seems to make the original, actual paper a bit thin and annoying, especially when you keep referring between two bits of paper to try and get an overall view of the authors aims and conclusions.
The other thing which gets me is that the supporting information seems to be a lot of methods and characterisation and as someone who's research is primarily method development/improvement it's really irritating. For me I always like to read through method details carefully as my pet hate is seeing a really interesting result in a paper and then realising that the methods are a bit duff. I used to be the sort of person who always skimmed over the methods in a paper but given my current research it's probably the bit I read in most detail and sends me screwy when I see stupid analysis (my pet hate is Lineweaver-Burk plots in enzyme kinetics - how are they still allowed these days!) and poor experimental design or lack of demonstrable controls.
The other thing which gets me is that the supporting information seems to be a lot of methods and characterisation and as someone who's research is primarily method development/improvement it's really irritating. For me I always like to read through method details carefully as my pet hate is seeing a really interesting result in a paper and then realising that the methods are a bit duff. I used to be the sort of person who always skimmed over the methods in a paper but given my current research it's probably the bit I read in most detail and sends me screwy when I see stupid analysis (my pet hate is Lineweaver-Burk plots in enzyme kinetics - how are they still allowed these days!) and poor experimental design or lack of demonstrable controls.
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