CiteAb comment article published in F1000Research
A comment article on what information should be included when reporting research antibody use, written by our team at CiteAb, has been published by F1000Research.
The article, which can be accessed here, outlines how publications routinely lack key details when reporting antibody use, including the host species, code number and even the name of the company that supplied the antibody. Authors also often fail to demonstrate that validation of the antibodies has taken place.
At CiteAb we rate our antibodies by citation, giving you the information you need to be sure the antibody you use has been used by others and will work. To do this we need good research data, and have come across many examples where this is missing.
The scale of this problem, combined with high profile concerns about experimental reproducibility, has caused the Nature Publishing Group to include a section on antibody information in their recent Reporting Checklist for Life Science Articles.
In the comment piece, titled ‘Reporting research antibody use: how to increase experimental reproducibility’, our team considers the issue of reporting research antibody use and what details authors should be including in their publications to help other scientists reproduce their work.
What are your thoughts on this article and the issues it raises – have you struggled to reproduce results because of bad reporting? Are you guilty of omitting key data in your publications?
We’d love to hear your experiences, so comment below or join the discussion at @citeab on Twitter. Alternatively, F1000Research operate an open peer review process, so take a look and comment on the article to help improve it.
~The CiteAb team
