Bring on the box plots
Box plots are excellent for visualizing important core statistics of sample data. We hope that a new online plotting tool BoxPlotR will help encourage their wider use in basic biological research. Read more
A retraction resulting from cell line contamination
After nine years in print, Nature Methods today published its first retraction; one that could have been prevented by cell line authentication. What does this mean for journal-mandated cell line testing? Read more
Let’s give statistics the attention it deserves
This month we launch a new column ‘Points of Significance’ devoted to statistics, a topic of profound importance for biological research, but one that often doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Read more
Importance of data sharing
No more (trade) secrets … Read more
Data visualization: A view of every Points of View column
We have organized all the Points of View columns on data visualization published in Nature Methods and provide this as a guide to accessing this trove of practical advice on visualizing scientific data. Read more
Return of the Points of View column
Our popular “Points of View” column returns this month after a brief hiatus. Here is a bit of history of the column and an introduction to its new author. Read more
New video functionality in online manuscripts
Data in research papers that is best presented in the form of videos gets short shrift compared to data that can be easily presented in figures and tables. Printing of representative video frames is a poor surrogate. Embedding videos in PDFs is possible but rare. Even online, where embedding videos in an HTML page is technologically easy, videos are usually provided only as links in the supplementary information for downloading video files. Read more
To share or not to share
Many in the mass spectrometry community agree that MS data should be made publicly available for everybody’s benefit. All data, including the raw files generated by the mass spectrometers. Read more
Where’s your ground truth?
When using or developing experimental and observational methods it is crucial to assess the method performance in an effort to ensure that the information it provides reflects reality. For experimental biologists this often means conducting carefully chosen control experiments with alternative methods or different experimental settings. More rigorous assessment, particularly for high-throughput or large-scale methods, often requires the use of ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ data sets. But talk to different people and you will get different answers regarding what ‘ground truth’ or ‘gold standard’ data is. This often includes a nice historical explanation of where the term ‘ground truth’ comes from. Read more
Cloud computing in biology
The sheer amount of data being generated in large-scale high-throughput biological studies is challenging current capabilities for data storage and analysis. One solution to this has been to move to cloud computing. In our editorial this month we discuss current efforts in this direction and the particular challenges of biological analysis in the cloud. Read more
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Let’s give statistics the attention it deserves
Let’s give statistics the attention it deserves
Guidelines for algorithms and software in Nature Methods