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Role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles: surveys of authors, reviewers and readers.

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE:Many journals permit authors to submit supplementary material for publication alongside the article. We explore the value, use and role of this material in biomedical journal articles from the perspectives of authors, peer reviewers and readers. DESIGN AND SETTING:We conducted online surveys (November-December 2016) of corresponding authors and peer reviewers at 17 BMJ Publishing Group journals in a range of specialities. PARTICIPANTS:Participants were asked to respond to one of three surveys: as authors, peer reviewers or readers. RESULTS:We received 2872/20340 (14%) responses: authors 819/6892 (12%), peer reviewers 1142/6682 (17%) and readers 911/6766 (14%). Most authors submitted (711/819, 87%) and 80% (724/911) of readers reported reading supplementary material with their last article, while 95% (1086/1142) of reviewers reported seeing these materials sometimes. Additional data tables were the most common supplementary material reported (authors: 74%; reviewers: 89%; readers: 67%). A majority in each group indicated additional tables were most useful to readers (61%-77%); 20%-36%?and 3%-4% indicated they were most useful to peer reviewers and journal editors, respectively. Checklists and reporting guidelines showed the opposite: higher proportions of each group regarded these as most useful to journal editors. All three groups favoured the publication of additional tables and figures on the journal's website (80%-83%), with <4% of each group responding that these do not need to be available. Approximately one-fifth (16%-23%) responded that raw study data should be available on the journal's website, while 24%-33% said that these materials should not be made available anywhere. CONCLUSIONS:Authors, peer reviewers and readers agree that supplementary materials are useful. Supplementary tables and figures were favoured over reporting checklists or raw data for reading but not for study replication. Journals should consider the roles, resource costs and strategic placement of supplementary materials to ensure optimal usage and minimise waste. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER:NCT02961036.

SUBMITTER: Price A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6157527 | biostudies-other | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles: surveys of authors, reviewers and readers.

Price Amy A Schroter Sara S Clarke Mike M McAneney Helen H

BMJ open 20180924 9

<h4>Objective</h4>Many journals permit authors to submit supplementary material for publication alongside the article. We explore the value, use and role of this material in biomedical journal articles from the perspectives of authors, peer reviewers and readers.<h4>Design and setting</h4>We conducted online surveys (November-December 2016) of corresponding authors and peer reviewers at 17 BMJ Publishing Group journals in a range of specialities.<h4>Participants</h4>Participants were asked to re ...[more]

PMID: 30249629

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Project description:BackgroundAlthough peer review is widely considered to be the most credible way of selecting manuscripts and improving the quality of accepted papers in scientific journals, there is little evidence to support its use. Our aim was to estimate the effects on manuscript quality of either adding a statistical peer reviewer or suggesting the use of checklists such as CONSORT or STARD to clinical reviewers or both.Methodology and principal findingsInterventions were defined as 1) the addition of a statistical reviewer to the clinical peer review process, and 2) suggesting reporting guidelines to reviewers; with "no statistical expert" and "no checklist" as controls. The two interventions were crossed in a 2x2 balanced factorial design including original research articles consecutively selected, between May 2004 and March 2005, by the Medicina Clinica (Barc) editorial committee. We randomized manuscripts to minimize differences in terms of baseline quality and type of study (intervention, longitudinal, cross-sectional, others). Sample-size calculations indicated that 100 papers provide an 80% power to test a 55% standardized difference. We specified the main outcome as the increment in quality of papers as measured on the Goodman Scale. Two blinded evaluators rated the quality of manuscripts at initial submission and final post peer review version. Of the 327 manuscripts submitted to the journal, 131 were accepted for further review, and 129 were randomized. Of those, 14 that were lost to follow-up showed no differences in initial quality to the followed-up papers. Hence, 115 were included in the main analysis, with 16 rejected for publication after peer review. 21 (18.3%) of the 115 included papers were interventions, 46 (40.0%) were longitudinal designs, 28 (24.3%) cross-sectional and 20 (17.4%) others. The 16 (13.9%) rejected papers had a significantly lower initial score on the overall Goodman scale than accepted papers (difference 15.0, 95% CI: 4.6-24.4). The effect of suggesting a guideline to the reviewers had no effect on change in overall quality as measured by the Goodman scale (0.9, 95% CI: -0.3-+2.1). The estimated effect of adding a statistical reviewer was 5.5 (95% CI: 4.3-6.7), showing a significant improvement in quality.Conclusions and significanceThis prospective randomized study shows the positive effect of adding a statistical reviewer to the field-expert peers in improving manuscript quality. We did not find a statistically significant positive effect by suggesting reviewers use reporting guidelines.

Project description:Coreference resolution is the task of finding strings in text that have the same referent as other strings. Failures of coreference resolution are a common cause of false negatives in information extraction from the scientific literature. In order to better understand the nature of the phenomenon of coreference in biomedical publications and to increase performance on the task, we annotated the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus with coreference relations.The corpus was manually annotated with coreference relations, including identity and appositives for all coreferring base noun phrases. The OntoNotes annotation guidelines, with minor adaptations, were used. Interannotator agreement ranges from 0.480 (entity-based CEAF) to 0.858 (Class-B3), depending on the metric that is used to assess it. The resulting corpus adds nearly 30,000 annotations to the previous release of the CRAFT corpus. Differences from related projects include a much broader definition of markables, connection to extensive annotation of several domain-relevant semantic classes, and connection to complete syntactic annotation. Tool performance was benchmarked on the data. A publicly available out-of-the-box, general-domain coreference resolution system achieved an F-measure of 0.14 (B3), while a simple domain-adapted rule-based system achieved an F-measure of 0.42. An ensemble of the two reached F of 0.46. Following the IDENTITY chains in the data would add 106,263 additional named entities in the full 97-paper corpus, for an increase of 76% percent in the semantic classes of the eight ontologies that have been annotated in earlier versions of the CRAFT corpus.The project produced a large data set for further investigation of coreference and coreference resolution in the scientific literature. The work raised issues in the phenomenon of reference in this domain and genre, and the paper proposes that many mentions that would be considered generic in the general domain are not generic in the biomedical domain due to their referents to specific classes in domain-specific ontologies. The comparison of the performance of a publicly available and well-understood coreference resolution system with a domain-adapted system produced results that are consistent with the notion that the requirements for successful coreference resolution in this genre are quite different from those of the general domain, and also suggest that the baseline performance difference is quite large.

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Role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles: surveys of authors, reviewers and readers.

Publications

Role of supplementary material in biomedical journal articles: surveys of authors, reviewers and readers.

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