Table 1.

Common omissions in reporting spectrophotometric and fluorometric methods of biofilm assessment.

Omission	Impact
References	Often papers cited as containing the protocol followed in the study do not describe the full protocol and redirect you to another paper. This can create confusion when trying to understand the protocol that was followed.
Replicates	The number of replicates within one experiment is not reported in the published paper. Furthermore, there are inconsistencies in the terminology used when describing replicates. For example, biological and technical replicates vs day-to-day and within experiment replicates.
Controls	While controls are mostly mentioned in the published articles, their values and variation are usually not reported. This makes it difficult to understand the variability associated with the method and how the raw data was processed.
Inoculum preparation	Different culturing methods can affect the behaviour of microorganisms, their ability to attach to a surface, formation of aggregates, and response to different stimuli, chemicals, or other microorganisms [32].
Environmental factors	In dry conditions, the microplate wells easily dry out, which affects biofilm formation. Hence, investigators take precautions to avoid the problem which are usually not reported in the methodology section.
Position of samples in the wells	The layout of plates is often not reported, but the position of samples in the microplate can affect the results. For example, the “edge effect” is a suspected phenomenon which might be due to differences in evaporation between the outer and inner wells, as well as thermal changes in the plate.
Orbital shaker settings	Most papers only refer to the rpm settings on their orbital shaker and omit other details such as the orbital diameter which can affect the shear stress exerted in the wells [33].
Washing	Description of this step is often omitted or vague terms such as, “gently rinse” or “slowly tip over plate” are used, which leave it up to the reader to determine how to perform the step [11,34].
Drying	This step is very often omitted altogether from the method description or contains very little detail on how it was performed.
Raw data	Most articles do not provide their raw data and omit information on how this was analysed [35].
Outliers	Outliers are very often not included in the paper or, if reported, their exclusion is simply mentioned with little argumentation for it and how the final data analysis was affected by their removal.
Data presentation	The most common way of presenting microplate experiment data is through bar charts. However, often they do not provide all the relevant information from a dataset (distribution, outliers, paired data relations). Hence the way data is presented can limit its interpretation. Changing to a scatter plot or a box plot can provide more details for the same dataset [19].