<img alt=“ScientificReviewSMALL.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/ScientificReviewSMALL.jpg” width=“252” height=“142” align=right />A published scientific report used to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Lately, though, in many a journal, the boundaries of a paper have blurred, with bits of methods, data or other material finding their way into the amorphous category of “supplementary" material appended to the paper itself.

One journal, however, has decided to take a stand against the assumption that the more you include in a paper, the better. In a notice published in its August 11 issue, the Journal of Neuroscience announced that as of November 1, 2010, it won’t be accepting supplementary material for review, nor including it with papers it publishes. The most the journal will do, says the announcement, is allow researchers to include a URL and a brief description of such material posted elsewhere.

J Neurosci notes a couple reasons for its decision – the main one being that it erodes peer review. Reviewers can’t possibly be reading and fully evaluating all of it (check out the graph showing the growth, in megabytes, of supplementary material per paper since 2003), and if they were, they’d have less time for the paper itself. And on the flip side, with all that extra (read: limitless) space available online, reviewers’ demands for more experiments can become excessive.

Hopefully, the notice says, the new policy will help reviewers get back to the basics: “With this change, the review process will focus on whether each manuscript presents important and compelling results.”

(Hat tip: DrugMonkey)

Image: Wikipedia