Top journals have accepted our antibody reporting guidelines!

We’re really pleased to announce that both F1000Research and PeerJ have now accepted the antibody reporting guidelines we set out in our recent article ‘Reporting research antibody use: how to increase experimental reproducibility.’

In our article we outlined 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. We also highlighted that authors often fail to demonstrate that validation of the antibodies has taken place. The poor reporting of antibody use leads to results that are not repeatable.

We have now updated our original article and a second version was approved this week and is now available on the F1000Research website. Among other changes, this new version stresses the importance of journals taking the lead in tackling this problem by adding our guidelines to their instructions to authors.

We’re really pleased that both F1000Research and PeerJ have already acted on this and have included our guidelines. The Nature Publishing Group, the Journal of Comparative Neurology and the Journal of Visualised Experiments also deserve credit for the guidelines they already have in place.

Now we are issuing a call to other journals – please read and consider including our antibody reporting guidelines in your instructions to authors. Strong reporting in papers makes results repeatable, and can only improve the quality of the research being published.

We’d be more than happy to speak to journals or researchers directly about our guidelines and to answer any questions they have, please just drop Matt a line on matt@citeab.com.

We are also interested to hear about any other journals who already have antibody reporting guidelines so we can add them to our list – do either drop us an email or let us know in the comments section.

– The CiteAb team

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