Content area
Full Text
E D I T O R I A L
On supplementary information
Nature Immunology is implementing new editorial guidelines for the supplementary material of research articles.
npg 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Beginning with this issue, Nature Immunology is changing its guidelines for supplementary information by implementing a restriction on the number of supplementary figures that
accompany research articles. Under these new guidelines, the number of supplementary figures should not exceed the number of main figures in each article. This change represents a natural response to feedback received during the past year from the research community. Immunologists, along with researchers in other areas of science, are unsatisfied with the present practice of adding an ever-growing amount of supplementary information to published papers.
A change is needed in the way supplementary material is viewed. Authors often complain that experimental data requested during the review process and requiring substantial effort to generate, in terms of time and money, ends up as part of a large file of supplementary information that the non-aficionado might never access. Indeed, this complaint may be part of a more general dissatisfaction with the present tendency of the review process to always demand additional data, some only marginally related to the main story. For referees, a large amount of supplementary data makes it more difficult to find...