Promoting Research Resource Identification at JCN

Since 2006, the Journal of Comparative Neurology has requested authors to provide a thorough reporting format of antibodies used in their papers, following the call for change issued in the editorial by Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Dr. Clifford Saper (Saper, 2005). Our journal’s higher standards of reagent identification have served as the foundation for our work with the Antibody Registry and creation of the JCN Antibody Database. Continuing in this vein, the Journal of Comparative Neurology is pleased to endorse and participate in the Resource Identification Initiative (RII), which aims to promote research resource identification, discovery, and reuse. This effort will not only further facilitate the process of identifying antibodies, but other key resources reported in the literature as well, such as model organisms, databases, and software tools.

The attention of scientists, editors, and policymakers alike have all turned recently to the issue of reproducibility in scientific research, focusing on research spanning from the pharmaceutical industry (Begley and Ellis, 2012) to the highest levels of government (Collins and Tabak, 2014; see also McNutt, 2014). While these commentaries point out that scientific misconduct is quite rare, they do point to a confluence of factors that hinder the reproducibility of scientific findings, including the identification of key reagents, such as antibodies and other materials, an issue with which the JCN readership is already familiarized.

There have been indeed some notable failures of antibody reagents in the 1970’s that led to retractions of important papers describing major neural systems. The field of anatomy has largely learned from these early experiences and regulated reporting of anatomical findings, while other factors remain a source of concern. First, the proliferation of antibody reagents has resulted in many of them being sold without having been adequately tested in the system under investigation (Prassas et al., 2014). Second, reporting practices in most journals for this potentially controversial reagent class are to some degree inadequate for even identifying the appropriate reagent as vendors may, over time, have created multiple antibodies against a target while authors likewise do not always provide catalog numbers for these reagents in their manuscripts. Third, antibodies may be sold and re-sold by different vendors, under different catalog numbers, further adding to the obfuscation of their identification.

Although the identification of material reagents does not guarantee reproducibility, it is a necessary criterion for replication of any study. To this end, we will continue to support rigorous identification of antibody reagents, but in joining the Resource Identification Initiative’s efforts, we also ask authors to improve identification of other reagents, organisms, databases and software tools which they report in our journal by citing Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) in their papers. These can be easily searched for and obtained from RII’s “Research Identification Portal” (please consult JCN’s Author Guidelines for relevant details). This will help promote a uniform standard across all major publishers and further improve the reporting of reagents that continue to play a central role in the study of neural systems.