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On Monday 17 April 2006 03:39 pm, afyfe wrote: > > >Indeed. I think the concept of online supplementary material > >should be quashed as quickly and thoroughly as possible. > >Not that I have much hope of convincing the journals.... > > > > > Perhaps the "un-reviewed, un-indexed, and un-citable sections of a > research paper" are not of general interest. However, they may well be > invaluable to anyone attempting to build on the results presented. Yes, that is the whole point. These potentially invaluable details should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny during the review process as the main text, and should be just as findable through citation searches as the main text, and should be just as diligent in making citations of their own as the main text. > As a grad student who wastes a frustrating amount of time trying to track > down structure factor data, program sources, refinement conditions, etc. > I can only hope the liberal use of "supplementary materials" gains more > acceptance over time. Let us suppose, for example, that you were interested in tracking down recent structure determinations which have benefited from crystal dehydration. In the "old days", armed with a list of key papers that introduced the technique, you could do this by searching for recent papers that cited the seminal papers. You can't do that any more, because such details are relegated to the supplemental material, where they may or may not cite the original literature. And even if the supplementary material itself does contain such citations, these are not harvested by the bibliographic indexing services so you cannot find them from the outside. Do you see the problem? The information you say want is exactly the information that has become hard to find because it has been relegated to second-class status. -- Ethan A Merritt Biomolecular Structure Center University of Washington, Seattle WA
