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Some observations...
a) Supplementary materials are rarely (ever?) formatted by the publisher.
For the journals I've been submitting to, we submit a pdf file that is put
directly on the site. Journal styles, units, abbreviations, formatting
preferences, etc. are not examined. I've seen spelling mistakes, and
obvious typos here that would never made it into the primary citation.
It would seem to me that people are just throwing together such materials
as a catchall.
b) Referencing the materials from the main text is useful - but there
should be a sufficient description explaining what is there. If the main
text just has (see figure S1) - what will I find there? Is it relevent to
my understanding? I need to make the effort to find the materials to see
if they are relevant. Maybe a table of contents for the s. materials could
be added to the main article...
c) As commented before - access to the supplementary materials is free.
However, unless you are reading the journal online - there is a tremendous
effort required to access the materials. You have to find the journal
website, and then locate the particular article. On some journals, you can
type in volume, page - others require that you use the graphical tree
heirarchy to find the article.
d) When are supplementary materials appropriate? There are variety of
situations - but the ones I like the best are ones that contain
information determined from sequence databases. Sequencing projects are
ongoing all the time - a blast search run today may give differing results
a year later as new genomes come online. The supplementary materials might
contain the accession numbers of sequences used in the text - particularly
if sequences are a composite of ESTs, etc. I consider this a snapshot of a
lab notebook. It shows how the authors may have assembled that sequence
alignment shown in the primary text, or how they selected conserved
residues indicated on a figure of a 3D structure.
e) When are supplementary materials inappropriate? When they contain
information critical to reproducing the results in the publications. I
know more and more of the materials and methods are being shoved into the
supplementary materials - but I fear that such information may turn out to
be critical to the understanding of experiments and interpreting results.
Can you imagine if the text of a paper indicates "kinetics were preformed
using standard procedures" and a reference given - and only in the
supplementary materials do you find out that of the dozen different
protocols they followed - they chose one known by experts in the field to
be flawed due to choice of buffer?
What is there to be done? The Science and Nature out there are always
looking for ways to reduce space - putting materials & methods into
footnotes, etc. In this case the supplementary materials could allow an
author the space to flush out all the details.
What is important however is that the supplementary materials gets
reviewed, indexed and formatted by the journal. The suplpementary material
is part of the publication and should be treated with the same critical
eye as the main publication.
Just my 2 pence....
Ezra
